Aconcagua Dawn 2: Amongst the Halls of Legend
by The Man In The Alley
Summary: Shepard must deal with the fallout of her actions in the hunt for Saren, Wrex and Garrus find their activities didn’t go as unnoticed as they’d hoped, Liara discovers a disturbing truth about Shepard’s past and Kaiden struggles to get a grip on reality.
1. A Touch Melodramatic

Thanks to all who read and reviewed episode one as of this posting-

Blackrain5775- thanks again for being the first to review the fic, and for sticking around. It means a lot. I've switched from asterisks to something a bit more noticeable for the changes in viewpoints and characters, hopefully everything will run smoother now. And the Garrus chapter was by far the most fun to write in the first episode, I'm thrilled that others dug it too.

Prioris- I loved the characters from the game, you know? That's the biggest reason I started this; to continue their stories in a way I'd like to see happen. And each character is great, so I wanted to represent them separately in the story. That you enjoy the characterizations is a serious ego boost for me, thanks a lot.

lieden- Yes, exactly! The dark feel is what kept me coming back to the game for more playthroughs, that sense that something very wrong was building. As a fan of dark and violent fare in any medium, I wanted to emulate that atmosphere with this story, with bits of comic relief thrown in, as these characters are often genuinely funny in the game. And yes, the plot is going to amp up and come together a few episodes from now, so things might seem a little disjointed at first. Thanks for the review!

Wispr- I appreciate the review of each chapter greatly, thank you! Honestly, with Din, I feel that I cheated him a little, you know? He gets to be a dick for like, three paragraphs and suddenly he's running for his life. I really should've paced myself with that intro, but it's been about three or four years since I've written, and I was definitely shaking off the rust at the time. Still am, really. Thanks for mentioning the Wrex bit from Tali's chapter, I was worried nobody was going to catch that! I giggled like a wee lil girl when writing it. Hopefully the vividness you saw in the shorter chapters carries over as I draw things out a bit for character development and pacing.

Again, thanks to all. I'd be completely full of it if I said I didn't need the recognition or critiquing, they are both extremely useful and appreciated.

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Previously in Aconcagua Dawn:

Volus ambassador Din Korlak boarded the frigate Nightingale in a rush, only to find that his ship had been set up as an ambush by Krogan mercenaries:

__

She breathed into the side of his mask, a rank smell of rotten flesh and mildew.

"You can't leave Ambassador. You have a very important meeting to catch." The claws dug deeper.

Din Korlak screamed.

Kaiden Alenko left the Normandy, citing stress as a major factor in his request for extended leave. But the Citadel isn't known for keeping its secrets, and Commander Shepard found out about Kaiden's plans to put in for post-traumatic stress disorder once he reached Earth.

__

Kaiden said, his voice raising, "I didn't put my life on the line for Commander Shepard and her assorted crew of alien mercenaries and techies and shy, stuttering, blue-skinned biotic fucking princesses, okay? I did it for Alice Shepard…"

Shepard thought the reason behind his wanting to leave was based on their own personal falling out, but it appears as though Kaiden might have more serious problems to worry about.

__

Blood had begun to rain in the car as it rumbled down the circular track of the space station. It fell on Kaiden's head, soaking his hair, staining his arms and legs red as he sat, trying to wish the sight away.

Saren Arterius stood in the red glow of the middle of the shaking, bleeding car, and leered at him through a broken skull.

"This isn't real!" Kaiden shouted.

A hand came down hard on his shoulder, and a feminine voice said, "You should really clean that up."

Kaiden shut his eyes and bit his lip hard enough to draw blood.

"Ashley."

While Shepard was with Liara T'Soni on a medical station orbiting the Citadel, Garrus Vakarian and Urdnot Wrex took advantage of the chaotic crime rate since Sovereign's attack in order to take care of business. Garrus met with an old friend-

__

Harkin stepped around the coffee table and sat on the couch, throwing his hands across the cushions to his side. "So, to what do I owe the distinct pleasure of a visit from a media hog like you, Vakarian?"

Garrus grabbed Harkin by the arm and twisted it behind his back.

The human squealed in pain, kicking his leg out and smashing the coffee table.

"They were all like that for a good long while, weren't they, Harkin?" Garrus whispered frantically in his ear, "Cases made easy by beautiful, young asari and human girls with black eyes willing to say anything to get a dirty, rotten, piece-of-shit like you a rock-solid conviction!"

He threw Harkin bodily across the room. His stomach slammed into the wood island that separated the kitchen alcove from the living room.

"I'm off the force, Harkin. I'm off the force and on the Normandy. I could kill you and walk away clean."

-while Wrex conned an elcor into sticking around Flux for just a few more drinks.

__

Urdnot passed the bowl of alcohol to the Elcor. "Drink up, Derby."

The bartender appeared by the Krogan's side. He wiped down the table they were at even though it was already clean. The human eyed the Elcor, his head resting on the tabletop. "You've got to get him out of here."

The barkeep withdrew his hand from the table, leaving the white rag.

Wrex rose from his seat, taking the rag from off the table

Wrex walked alongside the stumbling Elcor, helping him to his four feet when he needed it.

Then Derby said, "You are my hero, Urdnot Wrex."

Derby entered his apartment slowly, and it shut behind him.

Wrex ground his teeth together, taking the rag from Flux out of his suit and throwing in disgust on Derby's steps.

"If I'm such a hero, how did I know where you lived, you idiot."

A few minutes later, when Wrex spotted a transit cab two blocks down, a mild explosion shook the ground beneath him.

He continued walking, even after the screams began.

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And now, in episode two of Aconcagua Dawn, Shepard must deal with the fallout of her actions in the hunt for Saren, Wrex and Garrus find their actions didn't go as unnoticed as they'd hoped, Liara discovers a disturbing truth about Shepard's past and Kaiden struggles to get a grip on reality. Meanwhile, in the depths of the Citadel, something old and dark awakens. The story continues in…

Aconcagua Dawn: Episode 2

**Amongst the Halls of Legend**

There was the distant cry of sirens.

That was what eventually broke Garrus away from his meal. It wasn't from a sense of urgency or gnawing panic, the sudden realization that something 'must be done'; Garrus had absolutely no intention of leaving his table on the shaded exterior deck of the embassy lounge. No, what he felt was more akin to freedom.

Eight months ago, sirens would've meant work. In most cases, terribly mundane and boring work involving marital disputes, angry tenants and building code violations, rebellious young Hanar loitering outside storefronts, warning random human and turian shoppers that the all-powerful Enkindlers would one day return to eat their heathen children and set their homes on fire.

But everyone once in a while, a case would come down the line that would catch his interest. Murders of prominent governing officials, vicious gang-wars in the back alleys and dank corridors of the wards, dirty business deals and hidden sex-slave rings. Even after the rule-books and C-Sec guidelines had beaten and worn him down, if Garrus put enough time and effort into a case, he'd convince himself that this time it would be different, this time his superiors wouldn't get in the way of true justice with red tape and meaningless political rhetoric.

Of course, they always would, and even if Garrus hadn't used his C-Sec issued pistol to solve the case, they'd still find some fault in the steps he'd taken, or rather, jumped over. And Garrus would inevitably find himself sitting behind a desk reading standard security and investigation protocols for a month just to pass a simple reevaluation exam and start the whole cycle of abuse over again.

Now the sirens blared, and all Garrus felt was peace, freedom insomuch as to revel in the knowledge that regardless of the situation, be it a high-profile double homicide or a simple breast-suckling Asari babe using her newfound biotic powers to place the neighbor's noisy pet on a distant rooftop, no one would toss this case file on his desk. In the eyes of Citadel Security, Garrus Vakarian was untouchable.

"Birds," Wrex mumbled as he tore into the side of meat on his plate, breaking Garrus from his reverie.

"I'm sorry?"

Wrex finished gnawing on the meat, red strings of raw varren dangling in ribbons between his teeth, before he responded. "Birds, Garrus. When did they start importing birds to the Citadel?"

Garrus listened to the sounds of the world around them once more, and sure enough, beneath the sirens and the light chatter of passersby a floor beneath them, he heard the unmistakable sound of a twittering bird. More than one of them.

"And why now," Wrex continued, "when they're using heavy machinery and high-powered tools to fix this place up? Doesn't make sense."

Garrus shrugged and returned to his meal, cutting at the small order of fish remaining on his plate. "I doubt they're live birds, Wrex. Probably a new AWS feature."

Wrex chuckled. "You think they're gonna update the weather system with bird songs while C-Sec is dealing with the highest crime rate in forty years?" His chuckle grew into a deep, gutteral laugh, the meat hanging from the sides of his mouth shaking. "Yeah, 'sorry 'bout this lady, we understand you're husband's in several pieces on the front lawn cause some squeakers from the wards thought this'd be the perfect time to get away with a little random violence, but why don't you take yourself on a nice promenade in the park for awhile and listen to the birds."

Garrus shifted in his seat and tried to focus on the fish.

"'I'm sure it'll be very soothing. Calm you right down, lady.' Heh."

Garrus huffed, glaring at the krogan. "It's entirely possible that several subliminal elements have been added to the system to keep people from panicking. That's exactly the kind of response the Council would take to avoid more dramatic measures."

Wrex had dived back into the large slab of meat, but Garrus was certain he heard another grunt of amusement.

They ate in silence for awhile, Garrus diligently cutting the fish into bite-sized morsels, Wrex eventually lifting the side of varren with his hands when he'd reached the bone, gnawing on the fatty bits.

Soon, though, Garrus laughed to himself.

Wrex's face appeared behind the remains of the carcass. "Wha'?"

"'Promenade', huh?"

Wrex's deeply red eyes narrowed threateningly. "Yeah. 'Tsa word. Promenade. Like a-…a peaceful stroll."

Garrus' mandibles twitched in silent mirth.

Wrex cleared his throat and dropped remains of the meat back on the table. "Shepard's supposed to have landed by now. We should check the dock."

Garrus let the previous conversation drop and nodded. "Yes, I suppose we should."

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*

As they walked towards the elevator that would lead them to the Academy, Garrus pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes and popped one out, sticking it in his left mandible.

Wrex glanced at him and raised a scaled brow. "You human now?"

"No…they're just not bad after a meal. Used to have a partner, about six years ago, a human named McCroy who'd always bring these along on a stakeout. Eventually I got tired of not having anything to do while I waited for hours on end, and we both ended up bringing packs. They're wonderful to pass the time."

They stopped at the lift door and Garrus pressed the neon green call-switch. He reached into his back pocket for the lighter.

"You look ridiculous," Wrex said derisively.

Garrus stopped and sighed. After a second he removed the stick and shoved it back in the pack unceremoniously. "I miss Williams," he stated lightly.

They stood side-by-side, peering down the shaft beyond the clear safety glass, waiting to catch sight of the elevator.

"She would've told you the same thing," Wrex said.

The elevator rumbled to the top, the safety plate lowering.

"I know," Garrus replied as they stepped inside, "but she would've shared the laugh."

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*

Shepard stepped off of the tiny ship's platform and onto the dock, Liara close behind her.

Councilor Anderson and Udina, his aide for the time being, were waiting for them, along with several young lieutenants who'd snapped to attention upon her exit.

"As you were," Shepard said, readjusting the small leather satchel she'd slung over her shoulder.

"Shepard," Anderson began, his eyes apologetic, "I understand your sense of urgency-."

Shepard nodded towards the elevators, and Anderson began walking with her.

"With all due respect, sir, you gave me the long and short of it on my way here. I can't leave the Citadel yet, no matter how badly I'm needed out there or how much more those krogan scum torture the ambassador over the damn extranet." One of the lieutenant's reached to take her bag for her. She politely shrugged it away from him.

"No, thank you."

Walking behind them, Liara, who had already given her bags to one of the lieutenants, glanced between Alice and the young officer now carrying Liara's two light bags for her. Her pale blue skin began to redden at her cheeks, and she stared down at her feet in silent shame as they continued their brisk pace.

"What you haven't told me yet," Alice continued, "is what I have to do in order to leave."

"What you need to do, Shepard," Udina said, "is get back on that shuttle and return to the med station. You're not fully healed yet. The last thing we need is for the first human spectre to keel over dead halfway through a highly publicized rescue mission because she thought she was invincible."

"Why is he here?" Shepard kept her eyes on Anderson.

"Shepard," Anderson said, ignoring both of them, "you can't leave yet because we've run into a spot of trouble with the Alliance."

"What does that mean?" She asked wearily.

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*

The first thing Shepard saw as she led the group into the brightly lit boardroom was a human in a brown suit, standing at about five feet, eight inches, with his back to them. He was staring outside the large, picture-room window with a concentrated, far-off look in his eyes.

The second thing she saw was Wrex and Garrus, sitting next to each other at one corner of the large oak table that took up the majority of the room. They were both staring with clear disdain at the human by the window.

She caught Garrus' eye as she, Anderson, Udina and Liara filtered into the room and began taking seats. As Alice took a seat on the opposite side of Wrex she jerked her head towards the human questioningly.

Garrus shrugged and leaned towards her, whispering, "He's been standing there the whole time. Hasn't said a word."

"Looks like a tool," Wrex rumbled softly.

Alice smiled, knowing who'd introduced the krogan to that particular insult.

"What tool?" Liara asked out loud, settling in next to Alice, scooting her chair closer to the spectre and farther away from Udina. "Like an Omni-tool?"

Alice grinned and Wrex laughed.

Garrus, on the other hand, had turned his attention to Anderson. "Councilor, you've gathered us all here. Will anyone else be joining us?"

"No, this is it," Anderson responded, "it's a closed-door session from this moment on; we won't be interrupted."

"Then would you mind introducing us to our guest?"

The Councilor's lip twitched into a grimace only long enough for the Normandy's crew to notice. Then, "Certainly, Inspector, this-"

"Oh, there's no need to address him as such, Councilor Anderson," the man at the window said, his voice slick and pompous with an air of authority, "he's simply Garrus Vakarian now. A consultant working under Commander Shepard on the Normandy."

An awkward silence swept over the room.

"…Yeah," Wrex said in an acidic tone, "and I'm just Urdnot Wrex. A bounty hunter, working under Shepard on the Normandy. Which is a ship that flies through space."

"Wrex," Anderson began.

"I'm also krogan."

Alice slid towards Wrex. A loud thump resounded from underneath the table. Wrex didn't show any signs of pain, but he said nothing else.

The man turned from the window, a thin-lipped smile on his face.

He had a full head of brown, clean-cut hair that matched the color of his suit to the point that Alice doubted it was by coincidence. He wasn't unattractive, but his face was too skinny, his eyes cold and cunning behind thinly-rimmed, box-lens glasses and the smile he wore was anything but pleasant.

"That's right, Urdnot, you are a krogan." He spoke almost jauntily, as though he were trying to share in the fun Wrex was having. But there was no denying that everything he was saying dripped with insincerity and condescension. "And Garrus is a turian, Liara T'soni there is an asari and Alice Shepard and I are humans. And no matter what race we may be, all of us are currently receiving pay and room and board from the Alliance and their generous funding."

Liara exhaled sharply, frustrated. "I do not wish to offend anyone, but it appears you are making a game of stating the obvious and I wish that you would either stop talking or get to the point, if there is one…please."

"I think I know what he's getting at," Alice said grimly.

"Of course you do, Shepard," he said, "and that's why you're the one in charge. You should be the first one to understand what's expected of Alliance property. And make no mistake about it, folks. For every second that you fly the Normandy, for every credit you're given and safe haven you seek in the storms of battle, that's what you are and will be. The Alliance owns every single body in this room." He smirked. "Your souls, of course, are your own."

"Oh, how poetic," Garrus said wryly.

"Okay," Alice interjected, "let's cut to the chase. Who are you and what is it you want?"

"I was getting there, believe me, Commander. But first, let me explain something," the brown-haired man said slowly, finally taking a seat at the far end of the table, his eyes sliding over each of them. "The Alliance is grateful to you for your contribution to the galactic safety in this recent crisis concerning Saren Arturius and the reapers."

"Our 'contribution'?"

"You played your part, no one will deny that-"

"We did more than that, you cocky bastard," Wrex growled, "we saved your ass and everyone you know."

"But at what cost?"

Shepard frowned. "I'm sorry, I don't understand. I was under the impression that no cost is too high when it concerns the fate of every liv-"

"Yes, yes, yes, I've watched the vidlogs, I've read the reports, I know what you believe to have been at stake. But look at the facts, Shepard."

He brought up one hand and held out his fingers, then began to count them off. "During the course of your investigation, you set back, destroyed or caused irreparable harm to over two dozen different scientific research and development projects across thirty-five planets, causing, and I mean this literally, trillions of credits in damage, a high percentage of which belonged to the Alliance. You killed or were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of lives which the Alliance had also put great stock value in, and that was just on the ground. During the attack on the Citadel you demanded that Alliance troops risk their lives to protect the council during their escape, ultimately causing nearly twenty-seven thousand to die, and losing another hundred billion in damages to the fleet."

"Shepard's decision to protect the council is the only reason we were even able to secure a spot amongst them," Anderson tried to reason, "it showed that humanity did not put itself above the needs of the greater good."

"I wasn't finished, Councilor!" His eyes blazed at Shepard once more. "You took on alien crew members who went through absolutely none of the Alliance civilian training and documentation requirements, then ostracized and terrorized the sole human biotic on board the Normandy to the point where we'll be lucky if he'll ever be an asset aga-"

"Now wait a minute, Rickard-" Udina began.

"-in, not to mention getting the only other human on your ground unit shot to shit and blown to oblivion on Virmire-"

"That's enough!" Anderson commanded.

"-and while I'm sure we're all aware that one dead grunt, Chief or not, equates to little more than spilt milk in even the most minute version of the grand scheme of things, I'd say that you have a-"

Wrex was up and out of his chair like a bloodhound out of a broken collar, but Garrus had moved faster. The man Udina had called 'Rickard' squealed when Garrus grabbed him by the throat, lifted him a few inches off the chair and slammed him into the ground beyond Shepard's sight.

"Jesus Christ," Udina snapped.

His chair in two pieces beneath him, Rickard struggled to pry Garrus' fingers from his throat.

"Now _that_ just wasn't the brightest thing to say, was it?" Garrus asked him.

"Release him, Vakarian, this instant!" Udina looked to Anderson for help. "Aren't you going to do something?"

The Councilor watched the small man writhe on the ground, his face a mask of pain as he sucked in what little air Garrus allowed him to breathe. "Well," he sighed, "I figured I might watch for a while."

Udina scowled at him, his eyes searching the others. "His name is Rickard West, he's a contracted civilian, upper management for one of the soft branches of the Alliance. He was sent here to make you all understand the Alliance's grievances and to lay down some new requirements, alright? Now one of you get that turian OFF OF HIM!"

"Garrus," Alice called.

"What?" Garrus didn't look away from the human squirming on the ground beneath him.

"Does he know her name?"

"Oh, for the love of…" Udina threw his hands up in exasperation.

Garrus smiled bitterly at Rickard. "I'll bet you do. You read the case files, you said so."

The human shook with rage in his hand.

"Say it. Out loud."

Rickard's eyes bugged in desperation, trying to struggle from the turian's grip while barely managing to breathe.

"Say it," Garrus squeezed harder, causing Rickard to grunt as what little air he was breathing disappeared. "Say her name."

The room went silent, save for Rickard's frantic body jerking.

Garrus' brow furrowed. His hand clenched down even further.

"Ashley," Rickard screamed hoarsely, "Ashley Williams!"

Garrus released his grip and stepped up, backing away from the human.

It took several moments for Rickard to get onto his hands and knees and begin to suck in deep breaths in loud, tortured waves.

"Push over a new chair for him, Mr. Udina," Shepard suggested.

"What's a soft branch?" Liara asked the room airily, a dazed expression in her eyes, as though she had searched out somewhere else to be for the last few minutes, and was just now finding her way back.

"It's an unnamed sector of the Alliance," Anderson responded, "technically it doesn't even exist. Not on paper, anyway. That's what 'soft' means in this instance. There is no hard copy data on the particular organization Rickard works for."

"Oh, I see."

Rickard was up now, standing, straightening his tie and quietly fuming. He refused to look Garrus in the eye. Every couple of seconds his breath would audibly hitch in his throat.

"So, Mr. West. Are you ready to tell us why we're here?"

"You…" He rubbed his throat and coughed. "You said that no cost is too high when it comes to saving lives, saving the galaxy." He began to pace at his end of the table, apparently opting not to sit that close to Garrus again.

"As tragically romantic as the sentiment may be, it's bullshit. It's a fairy tale ideal like dragon slaying for the princess or self-sacrifice for the future of peace, instilled in the minds of the young so they might one day pick up a rifle and point it at someone who's values are different than their own, pulling the trigger and hoping, praying, wishing on a star for the best; and so that we'll all still have jobs.

"In reality, Shepard, 'ifs' and 'maybes' rule our world, not self-stroking sugar-coated idealism. If you had caught Saren sooner, you could've saved the nearly one hundred thousand lives that were lost in the attack on the Citadel. Maybe you need some time off to recuperate, retrain in certain tactical scenarios. If you had kept the Alliance more informed on current events, the brass wouldn't have been so angry when the damage reports kept landing on their desks unexpectedly. Maybe you need to have the CENTAL General's extranet address written on the back of your hand. And if you had exercised even the slightest amount of good, honest hesitation or self-restraint, maybe you wouldn't have found yourself stuck in a situation in which you had to choose between which of your crew members you were going to send to their death."

Garrus tensed, Rickard's hand shot up to steady the turian. "Maybe Ashley Williams would still be alive."

This time, no one jumped from their seats. No one grabbed a human by the throat.

And no one would look Shepard in the eye.

Except, of course, for Rickard. "There is most definitely a cost to saving the galaxy, Alice Shepard. And you've wracked up a tab you couldn't pay off in a thousand lifetimes. You have two choices. One; we severe ties right now. You will put in for an early retirement. Step down as commander of the Normandy. Your crew will either stay on in retainer and continue to prove useful to the Alliance, or they will collect a small severance for their troubles and be on their way."

"Some of us are not so willing to stab Shepard in the back, Mr. West." Liara's tone was firm and unshakeable.

Alice remained stoic on the outside, but internally she just wanted to touch the asari on the small of her back and feel the warmth of those blue lips against her own.

"Yes, some of you might find it difficult to bite the hand that sleeps with you, but bare in mind that Commander Shepard does not sign your checks. The Alliance does. Spectres by nature work alone. Shepard is the first human spectre, so during the hunt for Saren we were willing to allow her some leeway in her choices to see how things would turn out, but those days are over. If Shepard chooses to remain a spectre, which I have no doubt that she will, she must either comply with the Alliance's new standards or separate from within the ranks, and anyone she chooses to bring along after that point she will have to pay out of pocket.

"And trust me, once the pangs of hunger settle in on whatever sub-par frigate the council provides her with, 'stabbing Shepard in the back' will start to look a lot more like 'keeping yourself alive'. Only the Normandy can provide a stable environment that an asari, a krogan, and turian and a quarian can reside in withou-"

"TaliZora is no longer a member of our crew," Garrus said quickly.

"Garrus!" Shepard spit, biting her lip and closing her eyes.

West was silent, his eyes wide behind the black frames of his glasses. His eyes were locked on Alice.

"What," Garrus asked, "she chose to leave. It's not as though we threw her out of the airlock."

"Don't blame him, Shepard," West said with unveiled contempt and disbelief, "I would've found out eventually, and this conversation would still have happened. You allowed a quarian, a _quarian_ engineer into the very heart of the most top secret ship in the Alliance fleet, gave her free reign to poke around its innards, learn everything she possibly could, gain intelligence on every aspect of what we still consider top-of-the-line espionage hardware, and than you let her leave?! She just _walked out_?"

Shepard opened her eyes and met his gaze. "Yes."

Udina waited a moment as they stared at each other with mutual hatred, checked his watch and said, "look, this has gone on long enough. I won't pretend to understand Shepard, she's an enigma to me. But I'm quite certain she will not risk losing her crew or her funding just to keep her pride intact. What are the standards she will be expected to keep?"

West broke eye contact from Shepard and ran one hand through his hair. "A quarterly report when things are slow. If anything major happens, people dying, buildings exploding, evil beings make plans to destroy the galaxy known to her and than magically escape, the Alliance will be informed by Shepard immediately. You will find a replacement for Lieutenant Alenko _before_ you leave the Citadel. If that means the volus ambassador suffers longer, than that's tough shit for him. I'm sure the krogans will keep him alive if they really expect to get what they want.

"You will also take on a human as your chief consultant, this as a replacement for Williams. Obviously, you will not have a choice in this selection, the Alliance will."

Once more, the room went silent.

"Is that all?" Anderson asked.

"That's the gist of it, yes. Commander Shepard, you have as long as it takes to make your decision, but keep in mind that the Normandy is grounded until you do."

Wrex slid his chair back and stood up. Rickard flinched, eyeing him warily.

Wrex scoffed, looked to Alice. "I'm going to get a drink. Call me when something good comes out of this mess."

She nodded; then, only for a split second, caught sight of Wrex's omni-tool on his wrist. It was blinking orange and white in the lower right-hand corner of the holographic display. Someone had messaged him.

Garrus eyed her questioningly, and she gave him the same nonverbal answer she'd given Wrex.

He got up and walked out, followed quickly by Udina, who didn't even wait for Anderson's approval. The Councilor sighed. "I've really got to train him better. Shepard, I'll talk to you soon."

"Very good, sir," she said respectfully if not entirely 'there'. She was watching Rickard while biting her thumbnail.

Once the door was shut, and only Rickard, Liara and Alice remained, she spoke.

"All right, Rickard, I'll consider the new standards. Just one thing for the moment, though."

He smiled. She only wanted to mutilate him worse for that. "And what might that be?" He asked.

"This human chief consultant. He'll advise me on matters as would benefit the Alliance? Watch everything that went on onboard the Normandy and make separate reports of his own? Question my authority, attempt to undermine my control if it appears I might make the Alliance look bad?"

Rickard's smile stretched to a grin that, coupled with any other personality, would've been charming. On Rickard it was just slimy and arrogant. "Are those even questions? You know how this works, Commander."

"And as I have no choice in the matter, I imagine the Alliance has already made a decision they feel I'd disapprove of."

"How perceptive."

"Are you to be my new chief consultant, Rickard?"

He laughed as though she'd just given him the most flattering of compliments. "Shepard, I get the feeling you and I are going to enjoy a true sense of despise for a long time, but not to that effect. The Alliance has other plans for me."

She nodded silently, the thumbnail settling once more between her teeth.

Rickard waited a moment, than made for the door. "I'll be in the embassy lounge for a while. If it takes you more than an hour or two to reach a decision, my suite is on the thirty-seventh floor, room number twelve."

"Thirty-seven," Alice repeated absent-mindedly. "Suite twelve."

As Rickard opened the door to exit, he took a quick look at Liara sitting next to her, and shook his head, still smiling.

"On a separate note, Shepard, I have a signed certificate from you in my temporary quarters that shows you updated, within the last year, your Interspecies Relationship Training over the AEP."

"And?"

"Interesting that you chose an Asari to bed, given your history with them. I seem to recall coming across a file that detailed an event on the Elvira Training Station a few years back, of a young red-headed staff lieutenant storming through the mess hall after a pretty blonde, a second lieutenant I can't remember the name of. The staff 'Lt' picked up a sweet roll from one of the other student's plates and chucked it at the blonde, striking her in the back of the head with perfect aim. When the blonde turned and asked what the girl's problem was, she responded with the words, 'How dare you, how dare you'," Rickard recounted the event emotionlessly, save his own self-satisfied humor which was evident in every word, "'I thought you gave a shit about us'.

"To which the blonde replied, 'I did, I just care for her too'."

Alice stole a glance at Liara. The asari was frowning, listening to the story, deep interest easily read on her face.

"So the female captain, obviously angered and hurt by this, said…oh, dammit. My memory fails me. Are you familiar with the story, Shepard? Do you remember what the female lieutenant said to the cheating blonde butter bar?"

"This isn't a bar joke, West." Alice said, hating him more at this moment than she thought she'd ever be capable of.

He chuckled. "So say you…" Then, without an ounce of humor left, "what did she say, Shepard?"

Alice sighed. Looked to Liara. The blue beauty was watching her now, worried. It was clear she didn't like where this was going.

Alice looked quickly away, focusing her eyes on the sky outside of the window. "What's wrong with you, Samantha? Didn't your mother ever teach not to put your mouth on a… on an asari? You don't know where it's been."

Rickard snapped his fingers. "That's it! That's what she said."

He smiled, glancing between the two of them. "Well, Shepard, I'll be waiting."

He attempted to shut the door behind him, but the handle was quickly yanked from his fingertips. Liara stormed passed him, into the hallway.

Shepard waited until the door shut, put her head down on the table, eyes still locked beyond the window. She hoped and prayed and wished upon a star that the cold world beneath her feet would simply go away.

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*


	2. Details and Rum Punch

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*

ARKHAM SPACE STATION

R&D/SCIENCE LABS SECTOR

"The beauty of it all is in the details, Kaiden."

The voice was soothing, without a hint of a rasp or a tone too sharp or mundane. It was soft but not low, rich but not too distinct. It filtered through his ears and throughout his body, connected the pieces of his mind that felt broken apart, swimming through his veins and coating his stomach and warming his heart.

It made Kaiden feel as if it would be okay to lay down and sleep for a year, ten years, one hundred years. Until the pain of living evaporated from his soul.

"Feel that sun. Doesn't it just warm you up inside, like a blanket Mary has heated up for you?"

"Mary?" Kaiden asked himself as recognition floated lazily to him. "Mary…"

"Yes, Kaiden. Mary. Mary, Mary-"

"Loud and scary," Kaiden finished, laughing. "She hated that."

The voice laughed with him, like an old friend who'd been there through everything, recalling it from memory instead of from a psych-eval prep sheet.

"Yes she does. But she's not loud or scary to you, is she? No, she's as smooth as butter and purrs like a kitten when your hands are on her."

"Birds," Kaiden said.

"…um, yes, Kaiden, you're like two birds of a feather, alone togeth-"

"No, no. I hear birdsong. It's relaxing, I guess."

The voice was silent for a moment. No, not quite silent. Just distant, murmuring, as though it was whispering to itself.

Then; "Kaiden, let's try focusing on Mary. You love Mary, don't you?"

"I…I loved her, yes."

"Oh, Kaiden" the voice good-naturedly admonished him, "once you love something, you never truly stop loving it. Even if it goes away, and the memory of its features recedes from quick-reference thoughts, you still love it. And Mary, she's no different. You still love Mary, Kaiden."

"Yeah, yeah I do. I love her."

"Good, Kaiden. Very good."

"Doctor D., if I may break the fourth wall for a moment?"

The voice chuckled amicably. "Go ahead, Kaiden, and please, call me Lucien. Just remember this will probably be your last chance for us to talk. The sedative and the neural inhibitors should already be taking effect. Within the next six minutes you'll forget all about me and my associates."

"Understood, Doctor Lucien. But why is it important to the process to recall an emotion like this?"

"Well, the science of it is a bit complicated. But at its simplest terms, it's like this; sometimes memories are brought on by the senses; hearing, touching, seeing, and especially tasting and smelling. You could easily get a good, three dimensional memory matrix from that; but we can't lock on to those and guarantee the right outcome. You might once have tasted lobster and shrimp scampi on your seventeenth birthday, the night you lost your virginity to Rosalind DeSanchez, but we could just as easily wind up in your third night at Jump Zero, where you lost a bet and wound up eating shrimp scampi off the bathroom floor, _-schrshhh-_ then you lost your virg-_scrhshhhh_-a broom handle._-scrshshhh-_ Ha ha, and we wouldn't want you to be stuck in a memory like that.

"On the other hand; love, hatred, joy, sorrow, these are some of the most basic and primal of emotions. We might cloud them and weigh them down with other, more mature and difficult emotions as we grow, going from the simple, pure pain of wanting something we're told we can't have as a child, to seeing both sides of a controversial issue, like war or abortion-_scrsshh_-premeditated murder, rape-_scrsshh_-. Try to think of our system as a grid that searches out the colors of emotion and locates memories from them. As an adult, we must sort through the grey areas of all of your conflicted ideals and break them down in order to find the brightest of colors. Like Mary. Now, with primal yearning for Mary locked in your mind, we have a solid link to the memory we want to run you through.

"And so, with that, I'd like you to try and open up your eyes."

Kaiden opened his eyes. Blinked them furiously for a second from the brightness of the early morning sun.

And saw the truest and most peaceful form of beauty he'd ever known. Golden sand, warm beneath his hands and toes, even heating his rump though the khaki shorts he was wearing. The sand wasn't gritty or soggy, it was soft and separate.

He scooped some up and held out the palm of his hand. A cool breeze rippled through the soft pile in his open hand, granules dancing off into the air, only to land back on the shore.

The sound of the waves brushing against the shoreline, ever lapping and surging, brought up the fine hairs on the back of his neck and he shuddered pleasantly. The smell of the ocean, with its unpolluted waters stretching out beyond the line of sight, save for one small island a mile out, was so rich as to make him dizzy.

"Look at this beachfront property, Kaiden. It's yours. All of it."

"It's wonderful. I always wanted to come back here one day."

"What are you waiting for Kaiden. You're here now, aren't you?"

Wait. He was. Kaiden shook his head, trying to make sense of what was going on. He couldn't remember what had transpired in the last few days, or possibly weeks. But here he was, on the beach. And Kaiden suddenly didn't care about how he'd gotten here.

**Kaiden, turn around.**

Kaiden turned, as if on a whim.

There was Mary's parents' house. A three story beach house built on a large circular porch, the land around it bordered by a cream-colored picket fence. Beyond the fence, thick tufts of soft green grass stuck out in groups dotting the sand.

The house was a pale shade of blue, with a darker, navy-blue roof that covered the third story attic and partially covered the first floor, which was the largest and widest. A white wooden railing encircled the entire porch, save for the stairway that led to the entrance and, if memory served him, a separate entrance around back that led to a trail which subsequently ran up to the small ocean-side town of Anchorhead.

Mary worked at a restaurant during the day in Anchorhead. _God, what is the name of that place?_

**Zingers.**

"Zingers," Kaiden said out loud, and smiled.

**Go to her, she's inside the house.**

Kaiden decided he'd wasted enough time on the beach, he wanted to see Mary. He started to walk towards the gate built into the picket fence.

/CLICK/ **Alright, we're in. This is log number one for myself, Doctor David Lucien, presiding over patient four-six-delta, self-admitted for study of possible delusions, schizophrenia and hallucinations brought on by post-traumatic stress disorder.**

**Side note, Peter, write this down; patient is, in my professional opinion, not in the right frame of mind to be self-diagnosing, as the psych evaluation clearly showed; however, patient shows absolutely zero signs of PTSD. We should be fighting a torrent of detrimental self-hatred and brain scan visual data showing signs of crippling physical and emotional torment, but aside from some perfectly normal survivor's guilt expressed verbally in the entry exam approximately… seventeen hours ago, patient appears frighteningly well-maintained considering the facts.**

**No, what seems to be going on here is, sadly, another case of an L2 series biotic slowly breaking at the seams. End side note. Basil, what do the enhanced format scans show at this current time?**

/CLICK/ **Student Basil Perrenia; doctor, the scans are reading low. Kaiden is using-**

/CLICK/ **This is Doctor David Lucien; Basil, how many times?**

/CLICK/ **….I'm sorry, doct-**

/CLICK/ **How many times?**

/CLICK/ _**sigh**_**…This will not have been the last, Doctor Lucien, but I will not just wish that it would be, I will…er…**

/CLICK/ **'strive to make-'**

/CLICK/ **Do not help her, Peter!**

/CLICK/ **Right-right; This will not have been the last, Doctor Lucien, but I will not just wish that it would be, I will strive to make it so that it was.**

/CLICK/ **Doctor Lucien again; Basil, please continue with the scanner report.**

/CLICK/ **Yes sir, um-I mean, yes, doctor. Student Basil Perrenia; the scans haven't spiked, si-doctor. Not once. Kaid- no, ugh, Goddess! Patient four-six-delta is using three percent of his biotic energy, and has been since we began.**

/CLICK/ **Doctor Lucien; and what does this tell us, Basil?**

/CLICK/ **Student B-buh-Basil; …okay, I've got this. The three percent he's currently utilizing is known to be a constant of all L-series human biotics when they're asleep. This attributes to their faster heart rate, greater metabolism and a shortening of six to eight years of their lifespan.**

/CLICK/ **This is Doctor Lucien; fair report, Basil. I'm sure will start to see those spikes soon. Keep in mind, for the thirtieth time, that we **_**do not**_** use the patient's name while complimenting the logs. Pete, what've you got for me? And quickly, I've got to get back into the REM-stasis, I don't want him in his head alone for too long.**

/CLICK/ **This is Student Peter Reinhardt; Doctor, we've managed to locate the memory key nearly intact in his deep subconscious, we're only missing the…well, the hind quarters…**

/CLICK/ **Lucien here; 'hind quarters', Peter? Be specific, you're coming from the head of your class, I'd expect you to be better at succinctly relating the details. Just because you want to be a doctor doesn't mean you have to sacrifice being blunt.**

/CLICK/** Student Reinhardt; Doctor, patient four-six-delta can't remember how big her ass was.**

/CLICK/ **Oh…uh, Lucien here; I said 'blunt', Peter, not vulgar. In any case, make it average. Well, a nice average. Like something that would look good in sweats or jeans, but great in a tight dress…you know what, screw it, I could be stuck in here for hours if he goes deep. Make it fantastic, okay? An apple.**

/CLICK/ **Peter; very well, sir. Apple-bottom it is.**

/CLICK/ **Excellent. This is Doctor Lucien, ending log one, reentering REM-st-, oh, wait! One more thing. Who put in the damn birds?**

/CLICK/ **Student Basil; I'm sorry, sir? What birds?**

/CLICK/ **Lucien; The birds, Basil. The patient mentioned birds while I was setting up shop, trying to weave him into the memory, and it really threw me off.**

/CLICK/ **Student Peter Reinhardt; Doctor Lucien, I assure you, sir, birds were not part of the program, we know they don't show up until the seagulls at sunset. Those are the only birds we have coded in, sir, it's textbook. Probably just the patient's mind wandering as the drugs set in.**

/CLICK/ **No, no. It wasn't… After he mentioned it, I heard them too. Look, never mind, it might just be a glitch in the audio system. Lucien out. **/BEEP/

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The young blond human sighed, pulled off the ear set and tossed it onto the display above the keyboard. He rubbed his scruffy cheeks and glanced at the asari next to him.

"God, that dude is something else, huh?"

Basil Perrenia checked the data display one more time before ripping off her own headset and turning in her swivel chair towards him. "I swear to the Goddess, Peter, if that man ridicules me over the logs one more time I'm changing majors."

"Aww, don't do that, sweetness," Peter crooned, rubbing one of his fingers along the underside of her jaw. "Then what kind of a view would I have when I come to work?"

Basil giggled and playfully batted the finger away. "You're so gross, I'm like, twenty years older than you."

Peter leaned towards her. "I know, it's great. I've always wanted to be with a chick in her forties, older women are so fucking hot."

Basil's jaw dropped and she laughed. "Oh, shut yourself off, Reinhardt, before you combust. Besides, I'm not melding with you right now, it's totally the wrong time in my life."

Peter put his feet on the floor of the chamber and pushed, rolling in his swivel chair across the small circular room until he reached the mini fridge on the other side. "You're just afraid to lose you're virginity, my little blue sexpot. Don't wanna pop that mind cherry you've been saving."

He reached into the fridge and grabbed two cans of soda, kicked the fridge shut and used the momentum to roll back to his station.

"Mmm, speaking of, did you catch that nonsense Doctor dickhead was spouting in the preamble? About Kaiden's virginity?" She asked conspiratorially, taking one of the sodas from him and quickly kissing him on the cheek.

"What are you- oh, that's right! I was going to ask him about that shit!" Peter said, opening up the red can he'd kept and gulping down some of the drink.

"What did he say? 'That night Kaiden ate shrimp scampi off the floor and lost his virginity to a broom'?" She took a sip and wiped her mouth.

"Yeah, a 'broom handle', I think. That and the thing about rape. Weird shit, man… But I don't know, I couldn't quite hear, the audio got kind of static-filled, you know?"

"Right, but when was the last time that happened? Three months ago?"

"Yeah," he answered, "last semester. The burn victim."

"Okay…and we fixed that problem, a cross in the wires in between panels-"

"H-eleven and I-one, yeah, I remember. You were dead certain the doc did that on purpose…what, you think he's pulling the same sophomoric shit on us tonight?"

Basil's smile had grown shorter as they spoke, and now it was all but gone, replaced with hesitance bordering on worry. "I don't know, Peter. It's just; when he was talking, and he stopped making sense, I got this bad feeling in my gut. It wasn't like this the last time, it's like something isn't right."

Peter laughed, putting his ear set back on. "Relax, it's the same old, same old. Only more boring, cause nothing's wrong with this guy. Let's get back to it, sweetness, and you'll see. You'll be bored to tears watching him walk around that beach house with lady apple bottom in no time. Then you'll be begging for some excitement."

Basil gave him a smile, but she didn't feel it. She rolled in close to him and slid the headset back over her tendrils.

"I think tonight I'll settle for bored, Pete."

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*

CITADEL

"Look, the beauty of it is in the details, why can't you see that, Merl? This time the plan will work!"

Merl Orthanc sighed and tilted his head back in his chair, blinking the ache out of his wide salarian eyes. "Why, Sami, why do we have to have this argument every…dreaded…cycle?"

"It's a great show, okay? All we have to do is score the tickets, take some really well-earned time off and book a flight to the Horsehead Nebula."

"Yes, but a flight like that would cost a fortune in credits-"

"Not if it's for official Citadel business!"

Merl turned to the other salarian, who had his face obscured up to his eyes by the terminal he was working at. Sami's eyes were filled with hope and excitement.

Merl scoffed, incredulous. "We don't have any reason for them to believe we need to go to-"

"Badges! We have these rippin' badges now, Merl. Look, here's all we have to do; first we use the badges to get into the flight office, telling them, oh, I don't know; we'll tell them we got word of a burst pipe flooding krogan feces through the wall, then-"

Merl had known Sami since they were kids, which, at the age of nineteen now, wasn't really that long ago. But Sami sometimes made it feel like a millennia. Once they'd completed what education they'd been forced to, Sami had suggested working for the Citadel doing some crap job that they could do with their hands tied behind their backs so that Sami could use the time to scheme and plot out their real futures.

"-convince that new human councilor that the best way to get the 'lethal poison', heh, aka your mom's krellit sauce, off the station is on a top secret mission. From there, we-"

When they'd been hired as waste management, the job was really simple. Keep the pumps running, clean out the gutters every once in a while, make sure the garbage haulers and waste removal flights were on schedule; but just under two weeks ago, the very day after the attack on the Citadel, they'd been moved underground and stuck in this bunker to hack into the data stream the Keepers used to run, this as punishment for their involvement with Chorban and Jahleed's scanning plan.

"-kill him if we have to, but you leave that to me, Merl, you were always a big softie, I can kill a volus, I mean I'm pretty sure I can, I'll just get the mercenaries to sit on him and he'll pop like a soap bubble, those guys are really just big, fat gas-bags anyways-"

_God,_ Merl thought,_ if only Chorban hadn't ratted me out for helping him develop the software._

"-and then we flip the creds onto the next guy in line, give the injectors we scored from trading the fake tickets to the mercs that flew us there and we're in! It's just that simple. All in the details."

_Actually, if I'd only cut ties with that scumbag sooner. He turned a harmless science project into a seriously illegal credit scam; that lousy grabbak's ten times worse than Sami ever will be._

"So, what do you think? Are you in?"

_Sami could never actually hurt anyone or screw them over, even if he had the brains to think of a good way to do it._

"Merl, hey! Merl!"

_Still, I wish he was smart enough to help me break through this code. I'm tired of doing all the work while he sits their jabberin_-

Something light and fluffy struck him in the side of the head, fell to the floor and squeaked.

"Hey, Merl! Answer."

Merl turned to him, spotting his friend's eyes peaking over the terminal once more. The room was filled with data receptors, blinking lights and really, really old computer and relay screens.

"What do you think of the plan? Foolproof, right?"

Merl looked down at the floor and spotted what Sami had chucked at his head. A krogan plushy doll, the Palaven shotgun in its claws worn from Sami's constant squeezing, much like its soft, squishy head. He picked it up off the floor.

"Sounds great, Sami. We'll get started on it next week." He tossed the doll back over the terminal and watched two gangly green arms come up, fingers webbed at the bottoms splayed wide. Sami's hand clapped together on the doll, and Merl heard the other salarian huff in disappointment.

"You weren't even listening, were you? You always agree with me when you zone me out."

Merl smiled and turned back to his own terminal. "How can I argue with logic like that?"

Sami didn't respond.

Merl rolled his eyes. "Hey, while you're mad it me and shunning my existence, would you mind cracking open the Citcomp System Manual and trying to learn a little bit about what we're doing, so I don't have to do your work too before we head out for the day?"

Still nothing.

Merl waited, but Sami didn't respond. He always had some smart retort, unless he felt genuinely hurt.

"Greels, Sami, I'm sorry. I'll listen to your plan over dinner, okay? Honest."

The voice that finally replied was low and frightened. "I didn't do it, Merl."

Merl frowned, stood from his chair. "What? What are you talking about?" He walked quickly around the large blinking station.

Only to find Sami squeezing the tiny krogan doll, his eyes as wide as they could go and scared. Merl hadn't seen Sami scared in ten years.

Merl stared at his friend, questioning with his eyes.

"I got to page sixty in the manual, Merl, I wasn't lying when I told you that. I know there's hundreds of pages left, but in the first sixty pages, they definitely mention this." The young salarian raised his hand and pointed at the data screen. "And that's really, really bad, right?"

Merl looked at the coded data streaming down the screen. It took him seconds to recognize the pattern; one sentence, three words, repeating over and over again.

"Citadel Computer System Manual, page thirty-seven, paragraph twelve," Merl recited from memory, his near-breathless voice shaking. "Legend has awoken."

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*

Alice Shepard finally found her partner sitting down in the embassy lounge, hidden at a corner table near the back. She had her elbows on the table, one arm up, hand under smooth curve of her chin, supporting her head as she sulked, the other hand playing with a tiny plastic umbrella sticking out of a glass.

As Alice neared the table, she recognized the drink Liara had ordered. Rum. Ruby red rum. It was filled to the brim, the umbrella floating at the top.

Shepard seated herself across from Liara, staring at her expectantly.

Liara briefly met Shepard's eyes. She had been crying, that much was evident. Liara returned her gaze to the umbrella.

"Liara, I've never been one to care what species someone is-"

"Maybe not now, Shepard, but let's never say never. You seemed to care a great deal a few years ago."

Alice scratched the back of her neck nervously, searching for the right words to explain what had transpired that day on Elvira.

"Goddess, I'm such a fool," Liara said bitterly, "you must've found it humorous."

"What? Found what-I don't understand."

Liara rolled her eyes. "Oh, please, Shepard. Do you agree with him? Am I a…a shy, stuttering, blue-skinned, biotic f-fucking princess?"

Alice's face darkened and her eyes searched back and forth for a moment, before- "Oh, that son of a bitch."

"Do not blame him, Shepard, I would've found out eventually and we still would've had this conversation," Liara said dryly, echoing Rickard's words.

"Liara, Kaiden was upset, and when he said that I ignored it, that much is true, but sometimes that's what you do for people when they're angry. You let it go. I never intended for you to hear those words, Liara, I never want to see you hurting like this…"

The asari laughed. "I heard about it a week ago, Shepard, before we even left for the medical station. I just…I thought you were…I thought of you differently, then."

Shepard reached her hand out across the table.

The asari quickly yanked hers back, shoving both of her hands in her lap.

Then she watched as Alice wrapped her hand under the glass and began to turn it slowly so as not to spill the rum on the tablecloth. The umbrella began to bob in the alcohol, to and fro, dancing in the red liquid.

"What are you doing, Shepard?" Liara asked, obviously trying to sound distant and uncaring, but without much success.

"I'm checking for your lip prints on the edges."

"Why are you doing that?"

"To see if this is a refill, and you've been a busy girl, or if you've been sitting here for the last hour hiding from me, struggling to decide whether or not this is the day you'd like to try getting shit-faced for the first time in your life."

"And what if you see prints on it? How would you know they're mine? I might just have let some stumbling drunken human take a sip-"

"There aren't any prints on this glass, Liara," Alice said, still staring at the rum cup, her voice calm and cool, "and if there were I'd know in a heartbeat if they were yours. I'll be able to recognize the shape of your lips for the rest of my life."

Liara bit her bottom lip. She blinked a few times and looked out at the other patrons, but she didn't respond.

Shepard sighed. "Even if you run away today because I said something stupid eight years ago, something I've regretted from the second it left my mouth, and you set up a new dig site light years away where I'll never find you, and you hide from the world for another hundred years, until I'm old and broken, if you so much as kiss a plate of glass at a restaurant at the end of the universe, and I hobble my worthless carcass in there one day and take a seat; I'll still be able to point to that plate and say to whoever is sorry enough to be stuck with me," Shepard pointed in the air and prodded her finger, a small, sad smile on her face, "lookit there, I know those lips. Used to kiss a pretty girl, had those exact lips."

Liara watched her, eyes wet. One corner of her mouth turned up, just a little.

Alice leaned forward. "I'd tell that person that I'm sorry I did something that scared you off. That I never meant to hurt anyone when I said what I said, except the person I said it to, because I was hurting myself, Liara. I'd met asari before, but only briefly. And I was young and stupid and in pain, and I didn't care what came out of my mouth, so long as Sam knew she'd hurt me something awful. But when it did come out, I knew I had, at least for that brief moment, become someone worth leaving."

Liara suddenly brought her arms up from her lap, grabbing Alice's hand in her own, wrapping it up with her blue fingers and squeezing.

"I'm not going to run away, Shepard. Please, please don't think that. I-I care about you very much, I think I-. Well, I just, I never considered leaving you, leaving this, what we have. It's just that I've spent so much time with you these last few months, watching you, and I've grown accustomed to your charm and your wisdom. This is going to sound foolish, Shepard, but I've seen you kill people, bad people; but in all this time I've never seen you hurt someone. Am I making sense?"

Alice nodded. "Yes, Liara, I understand. I'm so sorry that I said that, I really am."

"Shepard, it was eight years ago. I have been hiding here, like you said, with the rum punch and all, and some of it, a great deal of it was spent dwelling in the pain of words you said long before we ever met. Once I realized how foolish that was, I started to focus on what was really bothering me…you're human."

Shepard blinked, taken aback. She frowned. "Um, Liara?"

The asari shook her head. "No-no, that's not what I meant, I mean, I like that you're human, you have very nice curves and you are soft in all the right places, very flexible, surprisingly flexible, really. Oh, I wish that I had your ability to voice romantic feelings…um, oh! You're wet, when I kiss you."

Shepard's eyes went wide, her head turning to scan the tables around them. "Uh-"

"Not too wet, you know, I once kissed a salarian named Harley on a dig site while engaging in higher learning, and his mouth was overly filled with saliva. You have just the right amount, it feels good, tastes good, you taste really good in my mouth-"

Alice shook Liara's hands. "Okay, okay, you're very sweet, but you've got to stop. Just tell me what you meant when you said you realized that I'm human."

Liara let out a breath of air. "Oh, alright. Um, I'm sorry, I'm not sure I know how to say this properly."

"It's okay," Alice said, "let's just avoid words like wet and flexible."

"…I-I said that I've been watching you. I have. I think I began to put you on a…what's the phrase? A pillar? Well, I worshipped you, for your strength and valor, your kindness. If someone with ill intent was unarmed, or if someone with good intent was armed and was…what did Chief Williams call it? Batshit crazy. Either way, ill and unarmed, good but armed and batshit crazy, you would resolve the situation without causing them pain. I saw you as a symbol of always doing the right thing. I guess that went to my head, and today when that horrible little man would _not_ stop speaking, I had my world shaken. I discovered…"

"That I'm human."

"Yes, exactly… Thank you for understanding."

Alice smiled. She got to her feet and pulled on Liara's hand, the asari meeting her halfway across the table. Alice kissed her deeply, sensually but briefly and then sat back down. "Thank _you_, Liara."

The asari smiled brightly. She squeezed Alice's hand again. "Nice and wet, Shepard."

Alice sighed. "Liara, we've got to talk about your choice of wor-"

Suddenly the ground shook beneath them violently. The tremor shaking the glass until it tipped, sailing over the edge of the table, rum splashing, glass shattering and sparkling on the floor.

People screamed all over the embassy lounge. Alice pulled on Liara's hands hard, bringing the asari out of her chair and into the commander's arms.

"Shepard," Liara whispered, frightened but not panicking.

Then it was done, just as abruptly as it had come.

Alice looked around. People stumbling across the lounge, diplomats grabbing briefcases and soaked bundles of contracts and briefs off the floor, the bartender looking at the mess of broken glass around him, checking for any cuts on his body.

And down on the floor, in the liquid remnants of Liara's first rum punch ever, the little plastic umbrella sat amidst the shining droplets, broken at the stem.

Alice kept Liara in her arms. "What the-"

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*


	3. The Rag : Six Years Ago

15DEC08 AUTHOR'S NOTE- Yeah…oops? I was taking a break from writing, reading a bunch of the other stories in this section, each of them great in some way, and I stumbled upon the awesomeness that is 'Case Dawgz's _Mass Effect: Redemption'_, and in one of the early reviews somebody dick-slapped him with the whole, Kaiden is spelled 'Kaidan', without an 'e' thing, and I realized with a manly shriek of horror that I'd been spelling old dude's name wrong for oh, about twenty-five thousand words. So yeah, I'm totally not going to punish myself with the bitch-and-a-half it would be to go through 's ridiculous procedural stuff just to change the spelling of his name to its correct design in the previous chapters or episode one.

Instead, I'm going to apologize to all present and any future readers for the misspelling. I mean, that's pretty bad, you know? I'm sorry, my bad. Oopsies and whatnot. It won't happen again.

So, with that acknowledged, and with an additional apology for the time I took off, the story continues:

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[]

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CITADEL

CHORA'S DEN

"-fuck was that?" Tyson cried, mopping up his club soda off the counter.

Wrex rolled his eyes. "Who cares, it's over, would you pay me already so I can leave?"

Tyson turned his head and glanced over the bar, shouting, "Bender…hey, Bender! Is the stock okay?" Tyson didn't wait for a response from the beefy, tweaked-out human Wrex made out in the back, his stained apron stretched lewdly across his fat belly. The salarian snapped his slick green fingers and pointed. "Go check the back, make sure nothing's broken. If we lost so much as a crate we're already dead. We still re-open in two weeks, no matter what!"

Tyson watched the human stalk away, twitching as he went. Then he turned back to Wrex. "Dumb, drug-addled ox. Good worker, though. You know I picked him up on Noveria during the stim prohibition back in seventy-one? Crazy story, you should ask me about it sometime."

Wrex stared at the salarian with one raised brow. "Do you really want me to ask you about that?"

Tyson shrugged. "I guess not. How's the murkwart?"

Wrex glanced down at the mug he'd gripped delicately between his claws. He turned the thick glass in his hand, watching the layer of rich, dark liquid at the bottom swirl and bubble. "S'good, actually."

"Yeah, should be. Certainly costs enough to get it imported, customs is a beast and a half too, gotta keep it chilled, you know? Preserves the flavor, something about the oxidants, hell if I know; worth it all for my krogan patrons, and not just you, Urdnot, 'spite what you think there's lotsa' your kind running fringe for the elements, coming through the Citadel saying 'Tyson,' they say to me, 'Tyson, you're gonna get Chora's Den fixed right up, and murkwart's how you're gonna get us to help you.' Got this little guy beyond the Verge making jumps for me, says this stuff gets him into all sorts of trouble with the authoriti-".

"Shut your mouth, Tyson," Wrex said calmly, eyes locked on him.

Tyson's already large, bulbous eyes went wide. He blinked and swallowed reflexively. "Wow, that was fairly direct."

The krogan downed the remaining murkwart and set the mug on the bar. "I was being direct when I told you to pay me. Now I'm angry."

There was a pregnant pause between them before Tyson nodded. "Right, of course, you want your cut. That's fair."

He walked around the circular bar until he was almost completely obscured from Wrex's vision by a metal shelf filled with opaque glasses and various bottles of liquor. In the stool he sat at, Wrex slowly slid one hand down his body until it rested on the shotgun at his hip, where it stayed.

The salarian popped back into his view carrying a fat, black rectangular drive, with an omni-link sticking out of the end of it. "Here we go."

He handed the omni-link to Wrex and watched the krogan hook it to the port on the side of his omni-tool.

Tyson flicked on the drive while Wrex tapped through various holographic displays until the tool strapped around his arm beeped several times and flickered green.

Tyson grinned. "Ka-ching. Satisfied?" He unhooked the device and took Wrex' empty glass without offering a refill and stuck it into the sink well on his side of the bar.

Wrex continued to stare at the green display. "This says five thousand."

Tyson nodded, washing the glass between his long green fingers. "That's right."

"The deal was fifteen."

"Yeah, hey-you've got a real memory for numbers, you know that's not a strong suit amongst your people, not that I'm saying there's anything wrong with that, it's actually quite helpful in some cases-"

"I want my creds, Tyson!"

Wrex lunged, took the glass from Tyson's slippery grasp and flung it into the wall across the room. It shattered near an asari stripper who was practicing her routine. She threw Tyson a threatening glare, but continued with her routine as the music swelled.

Tyson smiled approvingly at her and returned his attention to Wrex. "Sure, sure, you were promised fifteen, you only got five, you're angry and I get that, Urdnot. Just give me the washrag and you'll get paid in full."

Wrex blinked, confused. "What?"

"The rag our inside man at Flux gave you. The one with the elcor's address on it. We'd need that to complete our transaction in full, Wrex."

"Why?"

The smile fell from Tyson's face. "'Why?' 'Why', he asks me. It was a simple job, right? All you had to do was keep little Berny drunk and happy for a few hours until the package had been delivered, drop him off and walk away. Fifteen thousand's transit robbery for a job like that, Urdnot, and we even gave you the damn address!"

"Derby," Wrex said quietly.

Tyson, pulling a new glass from a lower shelf, didn't seem to hear him. "An explosion, you know, can be written off as a million different things. Anything could've happened to set little Berny's house into rubble-"

"Derby."

"-and our package was untraceable, Wrex. Un-fucking-traceable. But when someone finds a slip of threaded polyester with the mark's address written on it underneath that rubble, all of our careful planning and the client's hopes and wishes and a large percentage of your money goes out the window, because Berny-"

"Derby!" Wrex shouted. "His name was Derby!"

They moved too quickly for Wrex to see it coming. Before he could shut his mouth from yelling at Tyson, something long and brown, like a rolling pin, passed in front of his eyes and into his mouth. There was a man standing behind him holding whatever this was by the handles, keeping Wrex' mouth open.

A shotgun, his shotgun, cocked to his left. Wrex glanced at the origin of the sound as he struggled against the man behind him. The asari stripper had his shotgun and was pointing it at his face. Wrex looked back at Tyson, who was smiling again.

Tyson was holding a grenade. "I'm going to shove this down your throat, Urdnot."

Wrex stopped struggling.

Tyson nodded at the asari and the man behind him. "Shira, Bender, always good to have you in my company. You see Wrex, these are companions I can trust. They get the job done and they don't fuck up. Vidscreen on," Tyson yelled, "access newsvid dated yesterday, record title, 'Krogan fucked me'."

The screen above them blipped to life, and the human pulled up on the bar so that Wrex was forced to watch the screen.

An asari newscaster in an appealing, low-cut v-neck singlet appeared a moment later as the recording played back.

"-ime rate continues to soar, Citadel council representatives promise this surge will be quelled by mid-to third quarter-cycle. Unfortunately, that does nothing for Derbock Mcrorxi Vanedavide, an elcor scientist working temporarily on the restoration project for the citadel, who was killed today, just hours ago, when his apartment building in the Citadel residential area exploded."

Derby's apartment was shown, still on fire as the Citadel safety response teams fired jets of water at the burning stone foundation. A number of civilians watched from the streets, while many could be seen watching from windows in the safety of their homes.

"While there was no evidence inside the apartment that a bomb had been planted and there had been a few complaints of gas leaks in recent weeks, one made by Derbock himself, C-Sec claims that foul play may have been involved, this coming from evidence recovered _outside_ the victim's home. A small rag, eyewitnesses say, was picked up by officers once they arrived on the scene, and while the majority was burnt, the victim's address can clearly be seen on the remains. More on this story as it develops but now we're onto automated weather with Steve; Steve?"

The image froze on a volus in an ugly tweed blazer covering his methane suit, holding an elongated metal pointing device. "Vid-Screen off!" Tyson commanded.

He picked up a bottle of alcohol, read the label on it and set it back down. "No, not the Vermouth." He picked up another bottle. "Ah, Starkiller, cheap baranthian whiskey, varren-piss is smoother than this stuff, more expensive too," Tyson rambled, gripping the bottle by the head.

He smashed it into the side of Wrex's face with such ferocity that Wrex bit down on the cylindrical bar hard enough for all four present to hear a 'crunch' from within his mouth. At first Wrex thought he'd broken the bar. Then a horrid pain filled his lower jaw and Wrex realized he'd cracked a tooth, probably down to its roots.

On top of that, blood was now running down the left side of his face, dripping into his eye.

"You're going to solve this, Wrex. The C-Sec academy has an evidence vault on the lower north side, I'm sending the grid coordinates to your omni. I don't care how you get in and I don't care if you get out at all. But you destroy that evidence, today, now! Otherwise, you'll eat this fucking grenade wear you sit, and we spend the next week cleaning krogan stench off the walls!"

*~~*~~*

[]

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CITADEL 

INDUSTRIAL SECTION

SECTOR 21-ACO-613

2177 CE

(_six years ago_)

There was the distant cry of sirens.

Arliss Vakarian crouched, resting on his haunches and staring at the rubble that lay before him. It had been a relatively small three-story alloy factory, producing metals that were shipped locally throughout Sector 21. On the outside, the business had appeared moderately successful, not catching the dim-though-watchful eyes of the C-Sec station four blocks down but always making enough of a profit to ensure its placement in the community.

That is, at least, until two weeks ago. The corpses of an asari and a batarian had floated up the turian-built stream and had become lodged in an aqueduct in the nearby waste treatment facility. The few scraps of information C-Sec had managed to pull from the bloated, foul remains had suggested to Arliss that this factory, Alora Industries, might've been involved.

He couldn't prove anything at the time. Didn't have the evidence. So Executor Pallin put two relatively accomplished inspectors on the case.

And here was the result. Exposed, busted pipes dripping and draining onto the ground floor where he sat; ripped, fire-damaged wires sizzling and snapping, dangling in the air. The center of the factory, the floor of it, was no longer visible. The two floors above it had collapsed in on themselves, bringing everything crashing down to the ground floor.

Someone had set off an explosive device somewhere between the top floor and the roof.

Ruins.

Arliss took in a deep breath. He smelled the remnants of gunfire and blood and smoke. But mostly he smelled Hice, the illegal narcotic the factory had been secretly producing and distributing.

"Oh yes," said a smug voice to his left, "it's still there, in the air. What's left of it, anyway."

Arliss grimaced, rising to his feet and turning towards his son. "Proud of yourself, Garrus?"

Garrus stared back defiantly, one arm in a blood-stained makeshift bandage, the other trembling in the slightest way. He looked to Arliss as though he'd been hit by a transport carrier. By several of them, actually, and worse than that Arliss could see a passionate righteousness burning in his eyes. Righteousness and pride.

"Immensely," Garrus responded.

"Well, of course," Arliss said, sweeping his arm out, indicating the rubble, "look at this. Look at all of this wonderful destruction. The very sight of it just screams, 'Job well done. Mission accomplished.' I mean," he laughed hollowly, "nothing has been left standing. _Nothing!_"

He said this last word with such ferocity that Garrus blinked in surprise.

Surprise which quickly shifted into anger. "And what would you have done, Chief Inspector? Wait, no, I know this one. Conducted countless, pointless interrogations on Thorne's scumbag crew that lead nowhere because despite their lies you don't know or aren't willing to use the techniques necessary to get the truth; filled out inquest form after inquest form, tiptoeing around everyone making certain that while nothing got solved for months and the Hice continued to roll out, at least C-Sec didn't look bad in the eyes of the public!"

"Great, then, Garrus! Congratulations on your stellar victory against the awful drug runners. But let me ask you, where's your vindication? Where's your proof?"

"McCroy's got the files we pulled from their encrypted drives, I still have Abina's blood on Thorne's boots and gloves and you just took a deep breath of the most damning evidence, didn't you? They'll be scraping uncut Hice off the walls for a long time to come."

"Ah," Arliss cried, mandibles spreading and closing, arms raised, "excellent. And where are the drives he pulled the files from? Upstairs, on the roof, I hope! We'll be needing those drives as supplementary proof at the very least, just to show that the files weren't fabricated."

Garrus' eyes grew smaller as he frowned. He didn't respond.

"Oh dear, destroyed then, I presume. And Thorne, where is he? He'll have to stand in a trial before the council now, what with the asari's brutal murder directly connected to him."

Arliss waited, but still Garrus said nothing. His good hand trembled harder now.

Arliss glanced and pointed dramatically to a bullet-riddled, blood-spattered wall at the back, "Yes, there, that must be a little bit of him. Perhaps if we shuffle through the wreckage, we might find enough of him to stuff in a bag and drop in front of the council, and you can present your case then, right? …No, perhaps not. Besides, Pallin isn't quite the fan of bloodshed that you and your partner are, I very much doubt that he'll want to present your only remaining piece of evidence that isn't wildly circumstantial to the council as reason enough to destroy an entire building and kill every soul within it!"

Arliss stared at his son now, all of the pomp and fury drained from his voice, his arms at his sides. "All you have that is worthwhile, Garrus, is that Hice was being manufactured here. A crime punishable by several years in an off-Citadel prison facility, or even a brief two-year stint as a rock-miner in the Traverse. What these men really did, Garrus, was commit crimes that were and are punishable by death. And yet in all of your raging bravado, you've pardoned them of their most insidious work and set them free in death as common drug traffickers brutally stamped out by an overzealous officer with a bloodlust."

A knock came from the exit. Both turians glanced at the source.

McCroy stood silhouetted in the doorway, red lights flashing over him. The thin, gruff-looking human was just as covered in blood and viscera and the beginnings of deep, ugly bruises as Garrus. "Sorry to interrupt, Chief, but I thought Garrus oughtta know; paramedics are here."

"Aide-wards, Mickey." Garrus said softly. "Aide-wards."

"Yeah, right. Well, I'm gonna go get warded, 'fore I pass out, kay?" He took a step, then as an afterthought, nodded at Arliss. "Chief."

When McCroy's footsteps faded, Garrus looked back at Arliss. "Father-"

"I don't want to keep you here, Garrus, you need to be looked after. Those are serious wounds. I'd imagine the sight of you like that on the news vids should do something for your case, soften the public to you."

"They deserved it, father," Garrus said.

Arliss eyed him shrewdly. "Yes, they did. And so do the people above them, son."

Garrus stared at him, perplexed.

Arliss chuckled. "Well, it's just a guess, I suppose. In all of my years of tiptoeing and interrogating weakly, I always noticed that the further I got, the farther up things went. A simple idiot with a spot of illegal cargo would quickly lead me to the man that gave it to him, who'd then lead me to the head supplier, who after several cycles in custody on whatever minuscule charge I could find against him would hand me the man behind the payroll. It's a spider web, crime. There's a ceiling, to be certain; but everything beneath it? Spider webs."

Arliss turned and walked for the exit. "You won't lose anything major from this, Garrus, I'm sure you know that. They might even pin a medal on you and that mongrel partner of yours. But standing here, admiring your work, ask yourself; did you trace the web? Take a step back and see how it all connected? Did you even reach the ceiling before you brought it and this whole investigation down on top of us?"

Garrus appeared to be rooted to the spot he was standing on, his eyes attached to where his father had been standing.

Arliss stopped at the door, looking back, his features lost in darkness against the blinding light of the aide vehicles outside. "Finish what you start, Garrus. Or one of these days it's going to come back at you and you're not going to see it coming."

CITADEL

THE WARDS

(_present day_)

The vidscreen was barely audible, but Garrus, standing at a kiosk, bag of dried fruit still in his hand, heard every word he needed to.

An asari anchor looked back at him from the screen, a sparkle in her eye that didn't match her mournful voice.

"-unconscious, beaten within an inch of his life, decorated-"

"Buddy, you gonna pay for that fruit?" The seller asked.

"-Harkin is still alive. He's resting under armed guard at Citadel Medical Center one-thirteen, naturally, as fellow C-Sec officers wait for him to wake-"

"Hey, turian, pay or get outta line!" The vendor snapped at him.

Garrus turned away from the screen, dropped the bag on the counter and began to walk away.

'_Finish what you start.'_

"I will," he growled.

Behind him, the anchor continued on the screen. "-Just a traumatic time to be here, truly dark times for the Cita-"

The ground beneath the wards shook violently for a moment, nearly throwing Garrus off his feet.

In the stillness that followed, a volus cursed loudly. "That's getting' old fast-"

The entire floor they stood on suddenly raised three feet in a line down the middle of the wards, cracked open in a shower of metal shavings and bursts of electricity, and then with dozens of screams from the civilians around him, the ground exploded upwards.

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[]

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	4. Chaos Before the Storm: Part One

DISCLAIMER- Bioware owns Mass Effect. I don't. If I did, the cure to the genophage would've made it off of Virmire. Man, that pissed me off.

RATING - M for MATURE (MATURE = violence, unnecessarily harsh language, adult themes, adult content, adult friend finder, partial male nudity, full frontal clothing, strong pervasive super-Tokyo pinky violence funtime, Bea Arthur, Duke College girl ***** a *** in her dorm room, the Smurfs© and an Everlasting Gobstopper [barely described, I certainly don't want to offend anyone])

REMINDER: FemShep, Earthborn street urchin, Akuze survivor, Paragon

A/N- Time for a little suspension of disbelief, folks. I've built this shit up and put it off for as long as I could. Now my teeth are grinding on the bullet I've bitten. These last chapters are gonna be a doozy.

Asterisks are references to my notes at the end, as for some reason I was feeling particularly chatty during the writing of this chapter. If you'd like to read them, please keep in mind that they pertain to events in this chapter, and would therefore act as spoilers for what's entailed within were anyone to go awanderin' ahead of time. You know how this works.

Finally, DO NOT feel obligated to read the author's note at the end, it's completely unnecessary.

THE STORY SO FAR: (a brief reminder of the storylines, as a lot of things have been brought up in this episode and most of everything gets touched upon and merged in the next chapters [Kaidan's storyline, taking place separately from the events on the Citadel, will pick up again soon while Tali, who has not been forgotten, won't reappear until Episode 3])

* * *

Between two and three weeks after the death of Saren, the Volus Ambassador Din Korlak has been kidnapped by a group of krogans. The council is ready to send Shepard and her crew out on a rescue mission, but the Alliance is not. They have sent Rickard West, a contracted civilian working for a branch that doesn't officially exist to ensure that Shepard plays by their rules. She is to choose a replacement for Kaidan Alenko immediately, while the Alliance will supply a substitution for Ashley Williams. Shepard thinks the substitute is West himself, though he has assured her he is not. In West's and Shepard's first meeting, Rickard also managed to relate a story to Liara about an old flame of Shepard's and their falling out, along with Shepard's documented racist remarks during a heated argument in a mess hall. This caused a rift between Alice and Liara, but the spectre found the asari in the embassy bar and made amends.

* * *

Wrex was paid by Tyson, a salarian criminal now running Chora's Den, to keep Derby, an elcor scientist, drunk until his home was rigged with explosives. Wrex was given a washrag from the bartender with the elcor's address on it once it was safe to take Derby home, but Wrex dropped the rag outside of Derby's house before the explosion, and the remainder was discovered by the authorities. Tyson, along with his goons, has threatened to kill Wrex if he does not reacquire the rag from the C-Sec evidence vault.

* * *

For reasons unknown, Garrus beat much-reviled C-Sec officer Harkin half-to-death in his apartment and stole a lighter Harkin had used to frame a man named Sodermeyer for arson years ago. Possibly plagued by his actions, Garrus has been thinking back to the past (six years prior) when he had a human partner named McCroy, his father Arliss was a chief investigator and Garrus had just uncovered a drug and murder conspiracy at Alora industries, lead by a criminal named Thorne. Instead of taking the time to build a solid case against them, he and McCroy had gathered enough evidence to cover their asses and assaulted the factory, destroying it and killing everyone inside, including Thorne. Presently Garrus has witnessed a newsvid reporting that Harkin is still alive and has resolved to kill the human while he lies in critical condition at a Citadel hospital. Unfortunately, or perhaps not, this plan is hampered by the floor in the Wards exploding beneath his feet.

* * *

The crime rate in the Citadel has risen drastically in the last two weeks, with gangs becoming bolder and more vicious as C-Sec has its forces spread thin working to repair the damages done by Sovereign's attack.

* * *

The birds are singing, but not everyone's listening yet…

* * *

Merl and Sami, two salarians working for the Citadel, are serving out a community service sentence down in the Keepers' archives for their involvement in Chorban's illegal scanning scheme, trying to decode the language the Keepers' used to communicate with the Citadel. .com/wiki/Citadel:_Scan_the_Keepers

In the midst of a light-hearted argument, Sami discovers that a string of information that had already been translated (Legend Has Awoken) has begun appearing on one of the ancient terminals over and over.

Shortly thereafter, deep rumblings begin from deep within the depths of the Citadel, growing more and more violent as time progresses.

* * *

Now, back to the show…

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[]

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_Oh, that was a summer fix for sure, baby_

_And what a bummer tricks are yours, baby_

_You bought it, caught it, getting it good_

_Should of saw it, stopped it, what if you could? (C'mon, Steve)_

_Such woe is for the runner who thought love was free,_

_But oh, the summers in Thessia are for me_

_Here in the sweet valley breeze,_

_It's easy to remember,_

_I'm the strongest sorta' tease,_

_Baby, I'm gonna live forever_

_Yeah, yeah, yeah, the summers in Thessia are for me_

'The Embracers' - Sounds of the Matriarch Prod. © 2183

* * *

CITADEL

PRESIDIUM

_HOTEL VARISOTA_

FLOOR 37 / SUITE 12

The radio* was blaring as Rickard stepped out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist, steam escaping the confines of the large marble stone-slab shower behind him. He padded softly across the room, rubbing his freshly shaved cheeks as the pop beat and sensual vocals faded away.

"-and that was _Summers in Thessia,_ a taste off The Embracers new album, 'Pretty Little Miss Conception'; remember space cadets, you heard it here first. You're sittin' in with 'Varren Aaron' Jax on the F-T-L flight to nowhere and I'm taking your requests from our little station in the heavens-"

Rickard pulled a clean suit from the closet and inspected it for a moment, running his fingers along the soft brown fabric and tugging gently on the silver buttons. The closet hissed shut as he stepped away. He grabbed a pale yellow apple from a fruit bowl off of the end table next to his bed and sniffed it, smiling to himself.

Rickard bit the apple, relishing in the sharp crunch of his teeth biting through the skin and into the flesh of the fruit.

The broadcast continued. "-still no word from Citadel representatives as to whether they'll accept any of the ransom demands from the krogan terrorists who kidnapped Din Korlak- I mean, what's the word, good people, are we- excuse me, are _you_ gonna just let the volus ambassador get tortured and killed- I mean, this is insane, are the citizens going to have to watch this cat _die_ over the extranet next time, a lot of us have children that saw those transmissions, babes in life losing their innocence too early cause you won't take an initiative against these devils-"

His shirt and suit felt good, comforting against his skin and body as he pushed the buttons into place at his chest and waist. He walked around the bed and delicately picked up his glasses from their resting place on a silk handkerchief, which had been folded twice over and set on a dresser. He slid the frames onto the bridge of his nose and retrieved the kerchief, folding it once more before putting it into the breast pocket of his suit.

Then he turned, sat down on the bed with his hands on his knees and waited.

"-and of course the biggest question on the lips of the people today, 'where, for the love of Flux, is Commander Shepard?' To which I respond for the umpteenth time, 'give it a rest!' Don't expect one person, or, in this case, one group of people, dedicated as they may be, to save us from every-ev-, hey, Greg, do you mind? I'm doin' a show here man, yeah-yes, I don't care what-YES, I SEE IT, now get out of the studio, you moron-…oh, oh-oh no. Um, okay, I've just received this from one of my producers-"

Rickard smiled, breathing deeply, his eyes closed. "And here we go."

"-some kind of eruption from within the Citadel structure, a few quakes and rumbles at first, now apparently there's major damage to residential sector thirteen, as well as the Wards. Looks as though most of it right now is centered in the area surrounding the Council Tower; people, if you're headed to the embassies or to work at the presidium, whatever's in that area, it's not for you today, okay? Stay home, check the house over, grab the-"

There was a sharp beep to his left. An extranet holoscreen popped to life from the projector at the foot of his bed.

"Radio off," he said quickly, turning his attention to the transparent blue image hovering over the plush mauve bedspread.

The image quality of the outdated holographic display was only just clear enough for Rickard to make out a grim-faced male in his early thirties with short-cropped hair and a goatee.

"West," the voice emitter was shoddy as well; the sound was filled with static and popped at the end of his name, "it's Lloyd."

"Pasqer? I can barely make you out."

"West," Lloyd continued, a vague note of panic in his voice, "it's highly recommended that you leave the Citadel at this time-"

"I'm not going anywhere," Rickard stated firmly.

"But the tremors- the council has already been lifted from the Citadel, I strongly suggest you reconsider. At least until this is resolved."

"There are other matters I have to attend to. I've been trained adequately to take care of myself, Pasqualino; besides, if this continues, our friends from the Normandy will be far more likely to act in a manner that suits me."

"You're putting yourself in a bad spot. There's little we can do for you beyond this point."

"Don't worry about me," Rickard chuckled, then in a lower, rhythmic voice, "baby, I'm gonna live forever."

"…what?"

"Forget it, Pasqer. What of the lovely doctor T'Soni," Rickard asked, inspecting the undersides of his fingernails.

"Nothing. The asari is clean."

"One hundred and six years of personal history and you've come up with nothing," Rickard stated lightly.

"Oh, the time is accounted for, West. I could regale you with years of schooling transcripts, archeological digs and the resulting findings, the rare and woefully inept attempt at a date-"

"We've got nothing, then."

Lloyd sighed and the image jumped and rolled. "A veritable angel from cradle to Therum. She didn't involve herself in anything that could be construed as criminal activity until she joined the crew of the Normandy."

Rickard was silent for a moment. Then he shook his head and pushed himself off the bed. "No, there's something we're missing. She's the last…there's a weakness there, I can see it in her eyes when she looks at Shepard."

"It's not in the rec-"

"I'll find it myself," Rickard responded sharply, cutting Lloyd off. "Nobody said this was going to be simple. I mean, they can't all be cops and robbers, can they?"

The face in the holoscreen looked nonplussed. "You're taking a lot of risks here, West."

"Glory never comes to those who fear the fall," Rickard said. "Have you found a suitable replacement for Lieutenant Alenko?"

"Yes," Lloyd responded, flowing with the sudden change in topic once more, "he's already onsite. An accidental meeting between him and Shepard was being arranged, but with the current situation he's had to adjust the plan."

"What's his cover?"

"Jordan Falks. Ex-military, mid-thirties, seen a lot of action and is slightly wounded by it all, mentally. At first he'll just be looking for a ride off the planet."

Rickard nodded, smiling. "Yes, Shepard will like that. She-"

Suddenly, with a spark of electricity and a loud, obnoxious _snap_, the image was gone.

Rickard's smile slipped.

A thin trail of smoke began to waft from the tiny projector built into the edge of the bed.

At first he only felt it in the soles of his shoes. Then his knees began to shake.

From far, far away, Rickard heard the sound of hundreds of screaming voices.

The bowl of fruit on the table was shaking now, the apples lying in it vibrating, bouncing off of one another. Something crashed in the bathroom, followed by the tinkling of broken glass.

"This is poor timing," he said to the quaking room.

It responded with a violent jolt that threw him off his feet. He landed on his stomach, arms underneath him protectively. The fruit bowl flew from the end table, pelting him with several apples.

The bed thump-thump-WHUMPHED on the floor, inching away from the wall and towards him, its frame like a metal jaw that wanted to chomp down on him.

Rickard stumbled to his feet and tripped across the room, dodging rolling apples to return to the end table which was bolted to the floor. He jerked open the second drawer from the top roughly, reached in and pulled out a dull silver automatic pistol.

The quake wasn't subsiding.

Grabbing the table for support, he shoved the pistol into a deep pocket in the lining of his suit with his other hand, pulled two ammo clips from the drawer and pocketed those as well, then let go of the table and lurched to the door of his suite, slipping on an apple and falling against the metal, which mercifully slid open against his presence.

Falling to his hands and knees in the brightly lit hallway, Rickard saw immediately that he was alone, but the screams seemed a little louder.

The entirety of the Hotel Verisota groaned and shifted abruptly as though tired of standing upright in all of this. It began to tilt to the left.

Rickard came to his feet once more.

The elevator would be a no-go, he knew that. The stairs were a possibility but judging by the amount of people screaming down below, he'd soon reach a serious, bloody, flesh-riddled traffic jam.

There were picture windows at either end of the hallway overlooking the Citadel. From where he was standing, all Rickard could see was the cloudy coverage from the automated weather system stretching along the artificial soft blue sky of the Citadel dome.

Something immense fell with a shuddering boom several stories below him. The voices of the damned that he was now certain were emanating from the stairwell grew louder.

Then a second boom, a second shudder and- silence.

"Yeah," Rickard said, nodding, "stairs are out."

The hotel groaned and shook and tilted further; it was now nearly impossible for the agent to stay on his feet. Several short retorts sounded from below, like gunshots.

The floor-to-ceiling window to the left, facing south, was about thirty seconds away from becoming just the floor. Rickard guessed that, were the building to tilt much further, he'd slide down the carpet/wall and go crashing through it, falling to his death below. If he somehow survived the fall, pieces of the building, if not it in its entirety, were sure to crush him moments later.

He turned to the north window.

The lights in the ceiling flickered, died and returned to life. Another shuddering crash from far below, followed by a noise that sounded like several jets soaring around outside.

Rickard ran through the quaking hallway, bumping against the walls, shoes scraping for purchase against the carpet that was forcefully reminding him it would soon cease to be underneath him, and he would soon be as good as dead.

He yanked the pistol out from his jacket (it took several generous tugs), stumbling against the wall, his eyes never leaving the northern window that was now about fifteen feet away from him.

The building rumbled deeply at its base.

Behind him, the roaring sound of a jet plane returned for a moment, then faded just as quickly.

He'd escape through the north window, slide or climb down as much of it as he could, look for a body of water, jump when he had to and hope for the best.

He slid the safety off on the side of the pistol and pulled the slide assembly back, loading a round into the chamber.

The hotel tilted sharply once more. He was now just barely able to stay on his feet.

"Sorry," Rickard said smoothly, a smug smile on his face, "looks like I'll be checking out early."

He pointed the pistol at the window and pulled the trigger twice in quick succession. Two sharp retorts.

No shattered glass.

The first round ricocheted and disappeared into the floor a foot from his right shoe.

The second round came back straight through his right thigh with a soft _thwick_. Blood spattered on his pant leg and covered the carpet behind him.

"OOH!" Rickard screamed, falling to his left knee. "Oh!…oh, holy enkindling…fuck! …OW! …I-I SHOT MYSELF?!"

He stared horrorstruck at the unbroken window and the sharp blue view beyond it, which was all the while continuing to slant upwards.

"What?!" He cried. "WHY?"

The Verisota finally groaned like a beast from the depths of the ocean and tilted too far.

Rickard felt himself half-sliding, half-falling backwards for several seconds, suite doors and ceiling lights and an elevator door and the stairwell exit all passing him by until-

WHAM. He smashed into south window with a squeal of pain. He'd landed against his wounded right leg. Spittle flew from his lips as he pressed his face against the bulletproof glass. _I can't die,_ he thought, _I'm gonna live forever._

"I'm supposed to live," he said, not with sadness but confusion.

A shrill, shrieking alarm stuttered to life.

"**NOTICE…NOTICE**," an overbearing, feminine, electronic voice called out from the walls, "**SHOTS HAVE BEEN FIRED ON THIS FLOOR. CALMLY ESCAPE THROUGH PROPERLY MARKED EMERGENCY EXITS. IF YOU HAVE BEEN SHOT, CALMLY CRAWL IN THE DIRECTION OF THE NEAREST NON-HOSTILE FOR AID IN ESCAPING---**"

The lights flickered and dimmed again, the squawking voice dying with it.

Rickard let out a breath of pain and exasperation between gritted teeth.

The lights and the voice shakily returned.

"**--GUNMAN, PLACE YOUR FIREARM ON THE GROUND-**_**scswhhh-**_**CITADEL SECURITY UNAVALAIBLE-**_**sccsssshhh-**_**ESCAPE ROUTES UNAVAILABLE-NOTICE…NOTICE-THE GUNMAN HAS DISABLED ALL INTERNAL ESCAPE ROUTES-**"

"I did _not_." Rickard whispered against the glass. Then, "Internal?"

"**ANY WOUNDED OR THREATENED CIVILIANS, PREPARE TO ESCAPE EXTERNALLY.**"

"What?"

The wall beside him sizzled, popped and sparked, followed by a plume of smoke. Something inside of it had broken. Far above him at the other end of the hall, the wall hissed in that familiar, unmistakably electronic form. Apparently, that side had not been busted in the quake. By the north window, a hole appeared.

Several small, black objects came tumbling out of it. They traveled the same path he had when the building had taken it's last tumultuous tilt; they twisted and fell and bounced along the carpet and walls, speeding towards him and looking exceptionally heavy.

Rickard whimpered, "Oh, you've got to be kidding m-OOF!"

It was rectangular, about the size of a suitcase and at least thirty pounds in weight, and it had dealt a serious blow to his abdomen.

The second object, the same as the first, struck him in the shoulder, the third his legs and the last bounced off of his chest, flipped and slammed straight into his face.

His nose snapped audibly as more of the heavy black objects bounced against the window on either side of him.

"GUK!" Rickard cried against the one on his face, feeling warm liquid gushing down his upper lip, into his mouth with its odd copper taste and down and over his chin, wetting his neck.

The building gave another lurch then, and Rickard found himself almost entirely against the window.

"**10 SECONDS TO EXTERNAL EVACUATION. DO NOT HAND THE GUNMAN YOUR P.A.D.**"

"Whu-" Rickard shook the blinding colors from his head, blinking against the stars of pain in his eyes. He winced down at one of the objects in his hands.

"**5 SECONDS TO EXTERNAL EVACUATION. DO NOT HAND THE GUNMAN YOUR P.A.D.**"

It had two long nylon straps running along its length like a backpack and a thick black wire coiled against one side, with a control bar attached at the end. Between red smatterings of his blood, he read the inscription on the back.

**P.A.D.- PERSONAL AERIAL DEVICE**

Something nearby clicked. The picture window shook violently against him.

"**CALMLY EVACUATE EXTERNALLY…NOW.**"

"Oh," he said dreamily.

The window lifted before Rickard could get one arm completely through a nylon strap. His body shifted with the opening window, his bottom and lower back hanging out into thin air, his wounded right leg dangling out precariously.

A strong, whistling breeze shot into the hallway, blowing against him, ruffling his soft brown suit. The silver buttons trembled. It was at this moment that he noticed through the waves of pain crashing against the sides of his skull that he'd lost one; the wind had caught the hole where the button had been and a single brown thread, unraveled from its home, was dancing, whipping crazily in circles against his jacket.

"**ALL NON-HOSTILES ARE WISHED A PLEASANT DAY.**_"_

The other, unused P.A.D.s fell through around him. Then the support of the window gave way entirely and Rickard fell out into the sky after them, thirty-eight floors above the ground. **

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*

CITADEL

EMBASSIES

Shepard's lungs heaved, her legs pumping, one arm swinging rhythmically back and forth, the other stuck behind her, her hand wrapped in a vice grip around Liara's.

They ran through the embassy corridors, past small fires and grisly scenes of destruction.

"Goddess, Shepard," Liara cried breathlessly, "It's as if the reconstruction never took place. As if…"

They turned into another pale blue hallway leading to a set of stairs, skipping down several steps at once. A door at the end of hall was stuck open on a piece of debris, repeatedly attempting to shut itself against the waist-high chunk of twisted metal.

"As if we're chasing Saren again, I know," Alice said.

They reached the door and Shepard stopped, turning to face Liara. "You first," she stated matter-of-factly, then placed her hands firmly on Liara's waist and lifted her off her feet.

Liara stared down at her, confused. Then comprehension flashed in her eyes and she grinned nervously at the grim-faced spectre.

Alice kept her in the air. "Liara-"

"You are trying to lift me over the metal; help me through the door?" It wasn't really a question. The asari sounded amused despite her voice shaking from the adrenaline.

Alice frowned and began to shift Liara through the air towards the opening. "Yes…now go!"

Liara smiled at her with adoration and gingerly stepped down on the metal, bent low and waddled through the opening. On the outside she hopped down and looked back through the opening at Alice, who was about to mount the jagged metal block.

"One moment," Liara said.

Before Shepard could locate the best spot on the debris to place her hands on and lift herself up, the metal shifted abruptly.

Shepard to a quick step back, surprised.

The twisted metal groaned, shook and beat against the sides of the door. Then it shot out from between the frame like a bullet. Alice heard a distant, heavy thud just before the door shut, issuing a whispered whoosh like a sigh of relief.

Shepard realized what had happened only a second before the door reopened and Liara peered in at her, still smiling.

"You lifted it out biotically," Alice said, stepping out of the opening and closing the distance between them.

"Yes, but don't let that stop you next time, Shepard." Liara's eyes flickered between the spectre's lips and her piercing gaze. "I can handle myself, but I won't turn down any offers of chivalry."

Alice smirked.

Her Omni-tool beeped. They both looked down at it. "Oh, thank you," Alice said under her breath, connecting the call. "It's about damn time, sir! Are you safe?"

"I'm fine, Shepard," Anderson said, sounding as relieved to hear her voice as she was his, "We're being flown to one of the council bases. What's the status?"

"The status, sir? Speaking frankly, the status is FUBAR. The last quake peaked for at least ten minutes. The Tower sector is back to rubble, another hit like that and there won't be a home for the council to fix."

"Yes, they're already considering setting up permanent residence on a ship that will orbit the Citadel. Thankfully the damage doesn't appear to be spreading," Anderson said, "from all the reports we've been receiving, whatever's causing this is located directly beneath that district. Do you have the crew with you?"

Alice shook her head instinctively. "No, Wrex went for a drink and last I heard from Garrus he was headed to the Wards-"

"Shepard," her former commander's voice was grave, "last reports showed that at least twenty percent of the Wards are gone, destroyed."

"Garrus' Omni is still operational and transmitting," Alice assured him, "I just haven't been able to reach him on it. I was planning on taking Liara down to the academy C-Sec offices and searching for them over the security system."

"Going beneath the ground level is dangerous right now, Shepard."

"I'm not leaving without my crew, comman-," Shepard cleared her throat, "-Councilor. Did you manage to leave Udina behind?"

An irritated, gravel-shot voice in the background shouted something unintelligible.

"I guess not," Alice said.

"Udina suffered some minor injuries in the exodus," Anderson stated lightly, more than a hint of humor in his tone. "He's having them looked at now, as a matter of fact. Look, Shepard, if you insist on descending into the lower levels I won't try to stop you, but as you're headed in that direction anyway, I might have some information that could help you get to the bottom of this."

"I'm listening," Alice said, motioning for Liara to put her hand in Alice's.

Liara clasped their fingers together and Shepard began to walk them through the wreckage towards the elevator that lead down to the academy.

"Not long after our unfortunate meeting with Rickard, we received a distress call from deep within the Citadel, somewhere near the data stream archives. Given the current situation, we should have sent down a unit to investigate."

"Why didn't anyone respond, sir?"

"For a number of reasons; the majority of the message is garbled and inaudible. You can't expect to be surrounded by several thousand tons of steel and metal and rock and still have anyone topside receive your transmission, it's a wonder we were able to understand any of it. Also, this is the first time in the history of the Citadel that anything's gone wrong in the archives. It used to be completely run by the Keepers."

Alice and Liara stepped diligently and quickly across the debris-littered walkway of what had been the embassy park, which had only been a third of the way through reconstruction as it was. This second disaster hadn't helped its appearance. Small electrical fires had broken out in several areas, the wall around them scorched black. Entire chunks of the walls and floor were jutting out or missing entirely, exposing pipes within that sent water and filthy dark sludge flooding out in several directions. Thankfully, this area appeared devoid of any human or alien casualties. Shepard and Liara appeared to be the only two left, alive or otherwise.

Just beyond the C-Sec elevator they were approaching, the rest of the path was blocked by an enormous tree that had fallen during the quake.

Anderson continued, "After Saren and Sovereign were dealt with, a number of sentient parties replaced the Keepers in an effort to monitor and eventually decode the Keepers' language and understand how they kept the Citadel running. The message we received appears to have been from one such person."

"Got a name for me, sir?"

They approached the C-Sec lift apprehensively.

"Merl Orthanc, a salarian civilian."

Shepard frowned as she inspected the elevator. The overhang was intact and seemed stable for the moment, but the protective glass had been obliterated. The ground around them sparkled and shined with several thousand tiny remnants of safety.

"We're trusting civie's with the secrets of the Citadel, sir?"

"Just Merl and a few others. All of them are serving sentences for technological crimes. They're smart enough to do the job and they owe C-Sec time. The rest of the project personnel are, or were, contracted military and C-Sec. About two-thirds of the project party have already been identified as safe and out of harm's way. As for the remainder, well; Orthanc might be the only one left. We don't know."

Shepard peeked over the edge of the abyss. Far below, in the great hollow of the C-Sec foyer, Shepard could just make out the elevator sitting in its metal cradle, the occasional spark of electricity shooting from its sides.

She couldn't see the floor.

"I'll keep an eye out for your salarian, sir," she said, "I've got to go."

"Shepard?"

"I'll be careful."

"…Good enough. Anderson out."

Shepard turned to Liara. "Think you could get us down there?"

* * *

It was easy, at first. Liara had biotically lifted a piece of cement from the wreckage that was large enough to carry both of them and just light enough that it didn't exhaust her to lift it.

Slowly they descended into the open shaft, Liara standing in the middle of the uneven cement block, Shepard by the edge, her eyes searching the darkness for fires, bodies and a place to set down safely, but neither of them could even see the floor.

As they grew farther away from the opening of the shaft, the daylight outside began to fade, and the only form of light that remained was the soft blue glow of Liara's biotic power surrounding them.

"Shepard?" Liara asked softly, her eyes shut in mild concentration.

Alice glanced at her. She didn't respond right away, her eyes falling on Liara for the first time since she'd stepped on the debris.

The asari appeared to be meditating, and in the blue light Shepard flashed back to the first time she'd seen her, trapped in a prothean force field on Therum. She looked so vulnerable like this, so young; precious. Shepard wondered how different her life would be if, on their escape through the ruins, one large rock had fallen differently, if Liara hadn't run fast enough, if that krogan mercenary had reached her before Shepard-

The Citadel rumbled absently around them, and Liara yelped and opened her eyes.

The spectre had, in the few seconds of low noise the Citadel had made, lunged at her, wrapped one arm tightly around her waist and pulled their bodies together. Presently she was glaring at the large expanse of nothing around them, as though daring any inanimate object to try and touch the asari.

"Shepard," Liara whispered. "I'm alright."

Alice turned to her with green eyes blazing. "And you're going to stay that way."

Alice didn't let go of her and Liara didn't ask her to. They stayed that way for a while, long enough for that fierce sense of protection the spectre felt to fade ever-so-slightly back into the recesses of her mind. Soon the touch of their bodies against each other changed their breathing to the slow, shaky rise and fall of a heated embrace, and despite their lips not touching it was growing quite obvious that the need to shield Liara from a chance encounter with a falling piece of debris was quickly becoming pretense.

"It's very nice for me…I mean, I feel very good when you touch me like this. But you don't have to worry so much about me," Liara said softly, "I'm not going to break."

"I just want to feel you breathe," Shepard mumbled, her voice low and absent. Her eyes were dim, focusing on Liara's neck. "I want to feel you alive against me."

"I…I think it is alive." Liara responded.

"I know you are, doctor," Shepard growled, "I can feel your heart beating…wait, what?"

They're eyes met.

"The quakes, the destruction." Liara said, "they're localized, but scattered across the presidium and the wards, coming in waves of varying ferocity. At first they were small, only enough to break glass and make you stumble. Then they built, like something, whatever this is, is frustrated, trying to shake its way out."

Shepard frowned, lust receding. "I don't know. No explosion could have done that particular kind of damage for over ten straight minutes, but no living thing could survive _inside_ the citadel for thousands of-"

"Sovereign could have," Liara stated simply.

That gave Shepard pause, but a moment later she shook her head. "There would've been other signs. Mind control, unexplained murders, at the very least a change in the environment before it woke up… Besides, the reapers wouldn't have had anyone build this station with another reaper at its core. Maybe it's a defense mechanism set up by the keepers in case control was ever taken from them…"

Liara was quiet after this. They were still holding each other, still descending.

The asari sighed, "Goddess, this is taking forever."

Shepard shrugged against her. "I don't know, it feels about as long as taking the lift to me."

"-did you l-love Samantha?" Liara blurted suddenly, stumbling on the words as though they had retched themselves from her unwilling mouth.

Alice leaned back, her eyes widening. "Wha-? Where the hell did that come from?"

Liara cast her face down. "I-I am ashamed to have even asked. It's not my business, not really. I was just curious…strongly curious, after what that fool Rickard said, and what you told me in the bar. I didn't think it was going to come out like that…so abruptly."

Shepard gave her a strange, calculating look, though Liara would still not meet her gaze. Then- "…no. No, I didn't love her. I felt something like it, I think. She was the second girl I'd ever…been intimate with. She was a very good teacher, and a close friend, but..."

Shepard paused and scratched the back of her neck, looking uncomfortable. "This is awkward, talking about this now."

"It would be awkward talking about it at anytime, Shepard," Liara responded coolly, her eyes frozen on a spot near her feet, "you are the most willing of ears for the pasts of others, but your lips are like a river run dry when it comes to your own life."

Alice smirked. "You may not have the words for romance, but your analytical metaphors are surprisingly sharp."

Liara let out a deep breath and finally looked up at her. "I just want to know you, Commander Shepard. You keep a great deal of yourself _to_ yourself. It is…intensely frustrating."

Alice nodded. "Okay, so I didn't love Sam. I was, um, _fond_ of her; she was wily and vivacious, she had grown up a lot like me, learning to live on her own while very young, calling the streets of an urban sprawl 'home'. She was as rough deep down as she was around the edges."

"She sounds nothing like me," Liara said, her voice a mixture of humor and misery.

"You _are_ nothing like her, Liara. And the good of that, _all_ the good of that, far outweighs anything I saw in Sam."

Liara's eyes searched deeply in Alice's, trying to find something in them so she wouldn't have to voice the next words. But she couldn't see the answer there.

"And do you-…do you love me, Shepard?"

Shepard's fingers clenched on Liara's back, then released her. Her brow furrowed deeply, the scar beneath her right eye curving and twitching with a nervous tic beneath the skin. But it was now her eyes that said everything. They looked wounded and wet.

Her lips moved, and told Liara what her eyes had already said.

Liara thought the roaring pound of her pulse in her ears had drowned out the sound of Shepard's response.

At least until the inky black above them turned a sharp yellow, than a blazing orange, and Shepard's head jerked up and she bellowed. Liara felt Shepard's hands against her breasts, and with a mighty heave from the spectre, Liara's feet left the floating debris. She flew through the air as if in slow motion, arms cart-wheeling, legs pedaling for purchase of solid ground, her breath catching in her throat.

And a second later she landed, cracked her shoulder against the floor, twisted bodily, turning as though to pounce back onto the rock, eyes desperately seeking Shepard-

But the rock was gone. The flaming metal carcass that had come crashing down on top of them was also gone. Shepard was gone.

And Liara finally gathered her surroundings. She was balanced precariously on what was left of the floor of C-Sec. Beneath her and the miniscule sliver of metal ground she lay on, a steel support beam descended down into the bowels of the Citadel.

A few feet away, the Citadel elevator sat sparking in its cradle, hovering over absolutely nothing.

She and Shepard hadn't been able to see the floor from the opening of the elevator shaft because most of the floor was gone, having fallen in on itself, down, down, down into the metal belly countless meters below.

Where Shepard now was. ~

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*

CITADEL

C-SEC ACADEMY

HQ/EVIDENCE CHAMBERS

"It's not here," Serina Celoni said huskily, her voice deep and masculine for an asari. "We're wasting our time."

Anires glanced at her sister sharply. "That's what I said half an hour ago, when we almost had our heads caved in." She spoke in a much higher, almost melodic tone. "You're just getting bored now that everything's calm again."

They sat amongst the ruins of the C-Sec evidence vaults, sifting through the stacks of fallen plastic bags, each indiviually shrink-wrapped and stenciled with a case file number and categorization code.

The sisters were currently situated in one of the back rooms, the lights around them flickering on and off every few minutes. Two large metal shelves on either side of them had been shaken from their bolts in the floor and fallen against each other, dumping their contents all across the floor and acting as a kind of archway above the two asari.

"Ah," a third, ethereal voice cried excitedly from one of the adjoining rooms, "this one has been blessed with the holy jackpot!"

Anires slumped to her elbows in frustration. She sighed heavily.

"Marvin!" Serina shouted back gruffly, "did you find Tully's rifle or just more Hice?"

Thick silence answered her. Then, "this one has found more of the happy powder."

Before Serina could respond with the anger she felt burgeoning in her chest, he continued, "but this one will continue the quest for the other's apprehended ending device!"

Serina nodded. "Uh-huh…and you won't use the Hice to get high until one of us has found it, right?"

Another long pause. "…This one will not use any _more_ of the happy powder until the device is found. That is correct."

Anires grabbed a bag filled with a blood-stained tuxedo and chucked it at the opening the hanar was calling from. It bounced off of a file cabinet and rebounded out of sight. "I'm going to throw your squirmy body and all of your precious happy powder in an acid-vat, you ven-rah!"

"Annie," Serina said, "just look for the rifle."

"This one ejects its waste fluids on that ones' mothers, pure-blood!" Marvin yelled back.

Anires squeezed her eyes shut tightly and lifted one blue hand in the air before her. Serina rolled her eyes and scooted away, continuing to rummage through the stacks of evidence. The air began to shimmer blue around them. A moment later, a loud 'pop' resounded from the adjoining room, followed by the sound of handfuls of grit spilling to the floor, and the hanar's sudden cries of distress.

"NO! This one's glorious collection of illegal substance!"

Anires laughed.

A shot rang out in the room. At the same time, a bag Serina had been reaching for flew away from her fingers and slapped against a wall, falling to the floor. A trail of smoke rose from the bullet hole in the wrinkled plastic.

Arines and Serina stopped moving, their eyes drawn to the source of the shot.

Marvin floated nervously around the corner, his pink, shimmering body flecked and smattered with gray powder that was slowly being absorbed into his flesh.

A turian stood grinning darkly at the other end of the room, illuminated by a bright shaft of light pouring from the room he'd just stepped out of. He held a rifle in his right hand, now pointed at the ceiling.

"Found my gun," Tully said amicably.

He lifted up a small plastic bag. "And something far, far more valuable."

Serina squinted. She could just make out what Tully was carrying. Inside the bag was what remained of a white washrag, burnt on the edges and scrawled upon in barely legible black ink.

"Creeps," Tully said, "we gotta go see a salarian about an elcor."

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*

CITADEL

UNDERGROUND MAINTENANCE TUNNELS

"Sami, c'mon!" Merl Orthanc said, more exasperated from his friend's slow pace than he was exhausted from running.

"What's the use?" Sami asked, huffing as he caught up, his feet slapping in pools of water lying in the tunnel floor. "We're gonna die down here, Merl! No one's coming for us."

"We are not going to die." Merl's tone was less reassuring than he'd wanted it to be. "And we don't need help. We're getting out of here on our own."

He turned and glanced down the barely lit tunnel, past the small piles of rock and metal strewn about the floor. The tunnel seemed to stretch on forever before eventually, far in the distance, Merl could see that it started to curve around a bend with the light.

"We've got to be getting close to the evac tunnels by now," Merl said, "and from there it's just a straight shot up."

"Pfft," the taller salarian gave him an incredulous look, "it's going to lead to more rubble. Crashed metal and mangled corpses and no way out. That's all we're heading towards, you'll see."

Merl shook his head, turned and started walking. "There's like, twelve of us down here at any given time. There are _dozens_ of exits to the topside in the evacuation tunnels. It would be a miracle if we found anyone at all, alive or dead."

"Yeah," his friend replied, "maybe you're right. I mean, they would've all left by now anyway, considering that when the tremors started, they probably just ran for it instead of trying to send a distress transmission for twenty minutes!"

"Greels! Would you stop complaining already and start saving your breath so we can get out of here! I want to start running again in a second."

Sami didn't respond to this directly, but Merl could hear him whisper something about it all being pointless under his breath.

They walked in silence after that and despite what he'd said, Merl didn't pick up the pace. He didn't like it when Sami was mad at him and after forcing the other salarian to stay behind while he tried repeatedly in vain to send messages warning C-Sec and the Council, Merl felt extremely guilty for their current predicament.

When they finally reached the bend in the tunnel, Sami stopped walking.

"Wait," he said, grabbing Merl by the shoulder, "did you hear that?"

"Yeah, I did," Merl said sarcastically, "it's the dreaded zombie warlords, they're coming for your secret stash of krogan plushies."

Sami ignored him, his eyes wild, searching the darkness around them.

Merl waited a moment, watching his friend. _He's losing it,_ he thought sadly. Merl gently took Sami by the wrist.

"C'mon, let's get going."

Something high-pitched whistled in the dark. The sound was soft, but it echoed around the two salarians as though it were an invisible being between them, pursing its lips and blowing out the shrill sound into the air.

"There!" Sami almost screamed, jumping closer to him.

Merl began to search the tunnel himself. It was narrow and gray, the walls smooth and softly lit by a series of strip-lights, like flourescent bulbs, repeating every twenty feet or so. They were inlaid in the ceiling above them, which was low enough for Sami to be able to reach up and touch were he so inclined (Merl would've had to jump to meet his fingers to the cool metal), and it arced in a smooth semicircle, so that it appeared at times as if they were walking down endless corridors of rectangular half-moons. With the exception of the occasional break in the walls that branched into other identical paths, there was nothing remarkable at all about the tunnel.

They were alone.

The noise chirped again.

Slowly, Sami's eyes rolled to Merl, his expression accusatory. He reached for Merl's other hand, grasped it and held it up in the air before them.

Merl's Omni-tool was glowing green. It was receiving a transmission.

Merl breathed a sigh of relief and laughed quietly. "Oh, wow. Okay."

He brought up the display and began checking the electronic feed.

"What are you doing?" Sami asked. "If it's from the surface, we won't be able to understand it anyway."

Merl continued to focus on the display. "It's not a message to me, Sami. It's a broadcast."

Sami frowned. "What? What does that mean?"

"It means I never changed the settings after I tried sending the warning topside. I just hooked the Omni to the emergency data system in the archives and-OW!"

Sami had smacked him in the back of his head. "Stop narrating, egghead, I was there, remember? I meant what could that kind of broadcast mean? It's just noise."

Merl hesitated, then turned the volume up on the transmission.

Both of them leaned closer to his Omni, turning their heads to hear it clearer.

The noise returned once more. This time, Merl squinted and smirked, his large eyes disappearing into mere slits. "That's…it's-"

"It's noise, idiot. That's it." Sami sounded relieved. "You screwed up the wiring in your Omni when you yanked it out of the data port. It's just squealing at you now."

Merl stared up at his companion, cocking his head to the side. "You really never did pay attention when we were in Colonial Education, did you?"

Sami made a face. "Why would I, with you constantly telling me we'd never leave the Citadel anyway?"

"It's singing, Sami. It's a bird."

This revelation didn't improve the other salarian's disposition. "And that makes sense…how? Why would somebody be broadcasting that?"

Merl didn't have a chance to respond before something else did.

A low, monstrous, guttural moan rose from the tunnel floors, echoing off the walls, the puddles of water around them vibrating.

Sami grabbed him by the shoulder and tugged. "Okay, I'm ready to run now!"

Merl shrugged him off, taking a single step forward and stopping, thinking in the midst of the caterwauls, trying to connect the dots forming in his mind.

"Merl! Merl, please buddy, let's go!" Sami pleaded.

Merl moved, not sure at first where his feet were taking him. He sprinted in his tight-fitting uniform down the tunnel, not even glancing behind him to see if Sami was following.

The moaning persisted, rising even, growing louder and more intense, like a mighty behemoth howling from within a maelstrom.

His pace grew faster, his feet a blur beneath him, Sami's cries and eventual screams for him to stop and come back fading in the distance; the sound, that horrid sound like death itself becoming so much louder. It pressed against him, hugged him fiercely as if it wanted to crush him.

He knew now as he sprinted from corridor to corridor that Sami was long gone, lost somewhere back on the evacuation route. He knew that he was glad, happy about this. Because Sami, for all his whining and complaining, knew the way out. And Merl realized in a rising sense of dread that he, the smart one, the self-sufficient one, the caretaker of their friendship, was _not_ headed towards the evac tunnels.

He was headed for the beast screaming beneath and in between the tunnel walls. And he was getting very, very close.

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*

**A/N **- Does anybody remember when this site used to host NC-17 fanfic? That was ages ago. Well, way back when (around 2001) I created this profile as a separate, NC-17-only one, where I would test the garish waters of erotic fiction writing. Now I'm going somewhere with this that pertains to the writing of this particular chapter, so hear me out.

Anyway, once I'd bullshitted the system into believing I was old enough to write that type of material, I started uploading stories for various fandoms; Smallville and Buffy and the like. You know, WB shows with attractive young casts pretending to be my age while weaving universes and stories that befitted the written porn world wonderfully when taken only slightly out of context, and before long, wouldn't you know it, I was having a blast. Now at the same time, I was still writing legitimate fanfic for the Lyle Brown profile and trying to enjoy the best of both worlds, have my cake and eat it too, all on one site.

Then Xing, purveyor of justice and head of the site at the time, bowed to the outraged cries of the masses and took the NC-17 rating and all stories under its banner off the site. I was crushed. He didn't ban the ero-fic writers or anything like that, but it still felt like a serious blow.

Now I could've started uploading those same rejected stories to the Greyarchive or TSSA if I'd wanted to, but neither of those sites have the same feeling of community that FFdotnet has always maintained. So I burned out shortly thereafter on writing altogether, left the site, went to college, joined the Air Force, yadda yadda yadda, and wound up right back here after falling as deeply for the ME universe as I did for Buffy over a decade ago.

So why bring this up now, in a chapter halfway through an episode that has nothing to do with sex? Well, I'll tell you. Description. Description of action is key in writing, and writing description for an NC-17 romp between Buffy and Dawn or Clark and Lana is exactly the same in tempo and practice as writing about a bunch of damned interstellar fools running around a gigantic space station that's falling apart around them.

Both require precise pacing, a good idea of where the characters are and where you need them to be three pages from now, a lot of perseverance to push through the parts you're not all that crazy about writing to get to the ones that you are and a handy dandy thesaurus in your head or hands cause in action as in porn, you can't keep using the same words to describe particular things.

That's why I felt the need to say all this. I haven't experienced these emotions since '01. It's like déjà vu. I wanted this chapter to be over with so I can get to the good stuff after it and the really exciting stuff in the third episode. The biggest difference now is that I just don't enjoy writing lengthy action sequences as much as I used to. Instead, the little moments with each character find more interest with me. That's all. For those who read this ramble, I thank you. Hopefully you get where I'm coming from here.

**

* * *

**

FOOTNOTES:

*** **Driving home from work before beginning this chapter, I was rocking to some Def Leppard ('Armageddon It') and realized that rather than just starting off with Rickard over the extranet (erm…holonet?) acting all sinister and shit, I could begin with some ultra-cheese lyrics and world-build a little; I dig the whole asari girl-band thing*** and Mass Effect radio in general, you know? But after giggling like a wee lil' schoolgirl with the lyrics, I found myself in a right-side/left-side of the brain debate as to what to call the radio in this futuristic setting.

Calling it a radio would appear lazy, but referring to it as a Xaplethorp or a Peedleprong or some variation and then forcing myself to describe it as something that you and I both know damn well is a radio, would pretty much guarantee I'd never want to broach the subject again. Like old-school _Battlestar Galactica_. "Yeah, I know what that is, you ridiculous pricks. It's a banana. Call it a banana." Frak is okay, that's super-fragilistic. But a banana is a banana. Eventually it came down to 'radio' versus 'extradio', as in, the radio setting of the extranet, which seemed logical enough to me.

So I reasoned with myself. "Self", I said, "even today we are witnessing different mediums of entertainment as they meet and date and screw like rabbits amidst wads of consumer cash only to produce ill-conceived, modified web-TVs and cell phones that broadcast terrible streaming Hi-Def Asian horror films starring that pedophile principal from Ferris Bueller's Day Off with plots like 'cell phones can KILL YOU!'.

"Entertainment is rapidly being streamlined into a one-size-fits-all digital wi-fi Hi-Def widescreen Bluetooth wristwatch (w/Itunes!) that doesn't remember how to tell time but has downloaded several gigs of delightful German porn for you while you were taking a shit in the bathroom at Arby's, so that you won't even care what _day_ it is, much less what time of day…um, self," I said.

So I decided I wanted a brighter future with varying forms of media, and went with a regular ole' radio. Sorry if that rubs anyone in a wrong, Jeffrey Jones kinda way; believe me, it took a while to decide. Longer than it probably should have…

* * *

****** Give or take. I mean, the building was leaning pretty bad at that point, so it could've been more like twenty-eight floors, even with the ground level. I'm not sure. Anyway, in researching building structure and collapse, I have discovered, with great relief, that not only _can_ buildings fall sideways, (though I cannot recall ever having seen this happen) in the particular situation I have devised it actually makes sense that the Hotel Verisota _would_ fall on its side. Morbid that I had to run across this information on a 9/11 conspiracy-debunking site, though.

**

* * *

**

******* Yes, I'm aware that it's either redundant or wholly illogical to truly consider 'The Embracers' an asari 'girl band' since their species doesn't have a genital split; the Goddess didn't bless them with two different sexes to play a rousing game of 'you show me your Xaplethorp, I'll show you my Peedleprong' with. But excuse me, _I_ think they're hot blue chicks, _I _think Kirk would have spent several shoe-string budget episodes banging them in between bouts of razzlin' with krogans and _I_ think any single-sex species that has breasts, round bubble bottoms that fill out a space suit wonderfully and doesn't go to war against itself over ridiculous pissing contests is a single sex species of CHICKS, okay?

* * *

There is a simple and unusually unbreakable rule in writing, and I say unusual because most rules are, I believe, meant to be broken if you know first how to obey them. For instance, run-on sentences are bad news, bad practice and bad juju. And I love them. I am of the opinion that, if done with humility and care, they can flavor the colors of your written canvas wonderfully (I also enjoy mixed metaphors; I mean, how does one flavor a canvas? With cayenne?). The particular rule of which this footnote speaks, however, is considered sacred and cardinal if you choose to make writing a profession. It is the rule of character headspace.

Now please understand, I'm not saying that I think I'm good enough to sell my original writings professionally at this point and I'm not asking anyone else to tell me that either. What I _am_ saying, what I'm actually embarrassed to admit to myself, is the exact opposite. I'm not ready. Because in writing, once you've progressed to the point of crafting a narrative worth telling and grabbing the attention of passersby, you must always keep certain glaring truths in mind; and this one is, I stress, important.

Head-switching between characters who are occupying the same physical space in a single chapter or scene with no line breaks to note such a change is, always and forever, bad news, bad practice and bad, bad juju. No excuses. It confuses the reader; it muddles the perception of the scene. This most recent scene with Liara and Alice on the big chunk of debris, floating down into the C-Sec abyss is the example I chose to illuminate my own faults as I writer. Alice at one point flashes back to meeting Liara on Therum and wonders to herself what life would be like for her if Liara had died there. This is the first real character insight of the scene, and it sets up that this is _Alice's_ scene. Every internal emotion and thought in italics should come from her. All information we get from Liara should be external emotions and verbal cues to how she is feeling and what she is thinking. Anything more should be left to our imaginations until her perspective chapters or scenes later, whenever that occurs. All it really takes is three simple asterisks and a couple hits of the 'Enter' key to obey the rule.

And yet several paragraphs later we find ourselves ending with Liara, trying to read Shepard's thoughts which are somehow no longer available to us, as she asks the spectre if she loves her. It's a cheat. Not a gamble, not a loophole or a mistake on my part. It's a cheat. Shepard stays on the rubble and disappears into the abyss with the wreckage.

So basically, this whole long-winded footnote is an apology to you, reader, who have taken the time to read this story and hopefully enjoy it, because I'm breaking and will continue to break a sacrosanct rule of writing. My reason? I love scripted television. I love the way it progresses from scene to scene, episode to episode, season to season. I love the tricks it plays and the stories it can be used to tell. And in formulating this story, I decided to write it as though you were watching it more than reading it, where characters betray their emotions to the viewer only when the camera allows it, and all for the purpose of the ever-present dramatic effect. Aye, there's the rub.

With many heartfelt thanks to Blackrain7557, Wispr, R-I-C-A-R-D, maidros78 and paul16 for their Episode 2 reviews so far, I'll see you soon with Garrus and Wrex, the Creeps and more…

TheManInTheAlley


	5. Chaos Before the Storm: Part Two

*I have no idea if turians have lungs. January 10, 2010/ Deployed, just got internet now at the end of my tour, putting this chapter up. I return in February.

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*

CITADEL  
THE WARDS

Garrus' talons were slipping.

_He'd gone up with the explosion, cracked his head on something sharp and immovable and had come back down hard on his side, knocking the wind from his lungs. People were screaming all around him, the ground wouldn't stop shaking and the bile rising in his stomach had told him if this didn't stop soon he'd be revisiting the lunch he'd had with Wrex only a couple hours prior._

_His throat had finally opened up, his chest expanding as he'd slid involuntarily along the cold steel floor of the Wards when a second hit had rocked the world around him, fire bursting from a broken pipe within a crack in the wall._

_This time he'd flown sideways with the blast, his feet connecting with a volus merchant and knocking the short, white-suited man back into a stack of steel containers. One of the containers hit an already flailing salarian into the fire jetting from the wall, his full-body micro fiber suit bursting with flames, his screams of pain dying out as the oxygen was sucked from his lungs._

One talon slipped closer to the edge of the floor he clung to so desperately.

_A metal support beam, ten meters long and as wide as a krogan's midsection, came screaming from somewhere out of sight. It slammed through an asari still dressed in her lascivious Chora's Den attire as she held desperately to a vendor's stand, blood and viscera splattering in either direction before it sliced home violently through two cowering humans into the floor, killing them both as instantly as it had the dancer._

_The swells of frightened and pained cries around him had been quickly lessening, and the terrifying thought that soon only silence would accompany the destruction had flitted through his mind as his body finally crashed against the far wall of the bazaar, his right leg snapping against a pipe. He could feel the fracture burning before he'd landed once more on the floor._

Garrus swung his free arm up, catching hold of the edge. Huffing in sharp intakes of breath, he attempted to pull himself up. His strength failed him halfway, his body jerking back down into the abyss, his right arm dangling again, the three talons left on the edge sliding precariously closer to the end of what remained of the floor. "No," he whispered through gritted teeth.

_As another quake had struck, the ground opened up beneath him, releasing a wretched, foul odor that struck him like a clenched fist to the face, and a shrieking Garrus had thought to be metal now sounded like part of something much more sentient. At that point, the lights in the Wards died._

_A merchant who'd been scrabbling along the floor towards the northern exit must've become disoriented in the sudden darkness, as seconds later Garrus heard him fall into the gaping hole the destruction had caused. His scream faded from earshot long before Garrus imagined he'd hit whatever laid beneath them._

_Finally, laying on his stomach, catching sight of the salarian corpse burning only feet away, a weight, cumbersome and blazing hot had crushed against him. After that, darkness had taken over._

He'd come to sometime shortly thereafter, what could have been half an hour but felt like a few scant minutes, to find himself apparently alone in almost complete darkness, the only remaining light source being the scattered fires slow-burning amongst the ruins of the bazaar. Crawling out from under the cart that had fallen on him, he'd gotten to his feet and tried to find an exit. A few fragile steps in pitch-black on a fractured leg had landed him in this current state of peril.

_That smell, _Garrus thought to himself, trying to summon the strength to pull himself up once more. _It's gone._

Something powerful, alive and absolutely massive had done this. It was moving underneath the major districts surrounding the Citadel Tower, and if it continued for much longer, nothing would be left.

_Of course, none of this matters if I fall off this damned ledge,_ Garrus thought angrily.

Suddenly a shadow scurried in the waning light of the fires above, moving fast along the ceiling towards his position.

Then his fingers finally gave, one talon snapping from his left claw. And Garrus fell.

CITADEL  
INDUSTRIAL SECTION  
SECTOR 21-AGL-221/B  
C-SEC STATION LIMA *  
2177 CE

(_six years ago_)

"Vakarian!"

Garrus' eyes shot up from the forms on his desk.

Lieutenant Argyle was glaring at him from four metallic desks down, stooping over the vehicle checkout counter, his uniform pristine though strained by the size of his immense, bulky form.

"Where are the UDI files from last quarter?"

Garrus fought the urge to sigh. "Barter took them to central filing at headquarters two days ago, Lieutenant."

Argyle was a desk jockey, both in habit and in mind, having spent his entire career within the safety and comfort of one C-SEC station or another. Residential sectors, business sectors, obscure outposts and finally finding a home on 221-B, Baker Street of the leading industrial section of the Citadel. He believed firmly in getting results from paperwork and judicial application of the law. He was the most athletic turian Garrus had ever met, consistently working to build more mass on his body. He was also a chief vehicle dispatcher who'd never, to Garrus' knowledge, been beaten, shot at or involved in a single criminal pursuit, on foot or otherwise.

"Dammit! I _told_ Barter not to take them up until the middle of this week, I specifically stated that we need those numbers to correlate with current mileage and hourly logs. This puts us in a serious situation, Garrus, we need to _wonk-wonk-wonk-dee-blork_…"

Garrus continued to watch Argyle vent from his desk, nodding as the larger turian spoke, though he zoned out the actual words. He considered the Lieutenant to be the worst kind of idiot. A knowledgeable one, who could quote the regs and standards verbatim, but who didn't understand the difference between up and down, black and white. If Argyle were ever to be in charge of a serious investigation, innocent people and C-Sec investigators alike would perish under his command.

Currently, Argyle's stance changed, and Garrus knew he was winding up his rant. "-keep us busy through next week, that little idiot. Take an early lunch, alright? Be back in the office by five-after and we'll get started on cleaning up this mess."

Garrus' gut clenched. "Cleaning up the files? But I'm taking the rookies out on a training patrol today, sir."

Argyle waved one hand dismissively. "They'll get a ride-along from the guys at sector nineteen. I need you indoors today, you and Farkus and that empty-headed Barter are going to be too busy helping me fix the numbers in the system."

Garrus couldn't fight the sigh this time. "Lieutenant, I understand you want this problem resolved, but it's been almost a month since I've had a case on the outside. If I don't fulfill the reevaluation requirements I'll be stuck-"

"You're needed here, Vakarian. Don't fool yourself into thinking it's better out there. The real work gets done now, from the inside. You must keep order to catch the disorderly. That's final. Go get something to eat. And take Alina and Farkus with you while I track down Barter."

_The disorderly_. Thieves, rapists, murderers; disorderly. Whatever he called them, Argyle had never looked one in the eye, of that Garrus was certain.

Argyle stopped him at the door.

"You'll grow into it, Vakarian. You don't need to be an inspector, stuck out there on the streets, to stop crime. This'll be the best thing that's ever happened for you, you'll see."

To this, Garrus could say nothing.

CITADEL  
INDUSTRIAL SECTION  
SECTOR 18-RGG-135  
_AN ENKINDLED SPOT  
_  
(_six years ago_)

It had been over three weeks since the incident at Alora Industries. Thorne and his men were dead, the Hice operation squelched and the thirty-three sectors that made up Industrial Section Six of the Citadel had seen a thirty-five percent drop in drug-related crimes, with overall criminal activity on the Citadel falling twelve percent. One night, seventeen dead, twelve percent. Garrus knew the math. No matter what his father had said about cobwebs and true punishment, Garrus _knew_ he'd been in the right.

C-Sec HQ, of course, had shared the opinion of his father. While the news footage of him and McCroy battered and broken that night had caused a groundswell of support from the civilians and greatly lessened the penalty they'd paid, the price still seemed high to Garrus. As a team, they'd been split up and sent to different sectors of Section Six. McCroy, second under Garrus and only a part-time rule-breaker, had been reassigned to sector seventeen. He had narrowly avoided probation with an admittance of fault. He had a new partner.

Garrus, higher ranking and a repeat offender, had not fared as well. It would still be a ways into the next quarter before he was likely to see any action, and with Argyle over him, he'd be lucky if he lead an investigation again in a year's time.

"The whole thing, top to bottom, I'm telling you straight, people, was most certainly not caraminium piping," Farkus said, wiping crumbs from his smirking mouth.

Garrus and his two coworkers, Farkus, a beat cop with ten years under his built who'd never left the Industrial Section, and Alina, the receptionist, were seated around a beautiful, blue, blown-glass table with a curved, winding base in the outside patio of_ An Enkindled Spot,_ which was a small, hanar-run restaurant in sector eighteen that specialized in toasted sandwiches and what the hanar called 'crenaloes', which were basically spicy noodles in breaded bowls of heated broth flavored with various imported herbs. The food was some of the best Garrus had experienced on the Citadel.

"Well," Alina asked in her high-pitched squeal of a voice, "what was it, then?"

It was owned and staffed by a decent, hard-working and kind hanar family that had always greeted Garrus warmly. He'd been a regular for the last three years, ever since, while off-duty, he'd thrown a drunken krogan making a serious disturbance of himself out of the place and they'd insisted he stay for dinner on the house.

"Alina, I was standing there, I'm telling you, my jaw dropped. This poor salarian fool had paid top-credit, seriously, this had to have put him back at least ten-thousand, and beneath the crumbling foundation of this poor idiot's wall, well, it was _painted_ to look like caraminium, alright, I'm telling you, that's for sure; …but it wasn't!"

The asari's smile grew wider across her face as she listened to Farkus ramble, and the beginnings of a horrible, raucous laugh were starting to rumble in the back of her throat. "Uh-huh…ooh goddess, what was it, Harky?"

Garrus loved _An Enkindled Spot_.

"I'm telling you, Garrus, you'll love this, Alina, it was depleted ore! _Painted_, depleted ore piping! In his wall!"

"No! No, that's just too funny!" The laugh that emanated from Alina's mouth was so screeching, so harsh that Garrus felt needles of pain prickling the inside of his head.

Garrus loved this restaurant, and when he'd been reassigned, he'd invited his coworkers here one lazy afternoon, just to try and make his work a little more bearable. They'd been here every day since.

"I know," Farkus shouted, bits of meat and spittle-swathed, baked bread spraying from his mandibles to the table cloth and speckling Garrus' uniform, "I tried to tell him, but I-," the turian sucked in a breath of air while fighting a fit of laughter, "-I just didn't have the heart!"

Garrus loved this restaurant and he knew, without ever having questioned this, that the moment he escaped the doldrums-inducing confines of C-Sec Station Lima, sector twenty-one, he would never set foot on this property again as long as he should live, out of the simple and pure fear that either of these two individuals would happen upon him as he ate, and attempt to strike up a conversation.

"Hey, Pluto!" A familiar voice was suddenly shouting from the street, "D'jyou hear the one about the three-legged asari prostitute?"

Alina grimaced at someone over his shoulder, her bright blue face darkening a shade under the mounds of make-up she'd no doubt caked on before work. But all Garrus felt was a surge of relief in his chest.

"-the hell is that?" Harkus asked around his next mouthful.

"Give me a moment," Garrus responded, rising up from his chair and stepping away from the table.

He turned and immediately smiled.

Parked in an unmarked transit vehicle, McCroy sat behind the wheel, grinning goofily out at him, a half-burnt cigarette dangling between his lips.

"Mickey," Garrus said, approaching the street, "I've told you before that you should keep your mouth shut in public."

"Yeah," the short, blond human squinted in the sunlight and nodded, "I'm a public relations nightmare."

As Garrus got closer he took note of McCroy's features. The human had always been handsome, he supposed, but the night they had hit Alora Industries, he'd taken a pretty vicious beating before they'd reached the roof with the explosives. At one point or another, Garrus believed it had been between the third and fourth floors, they'd split up, and Mickey had come across Belagus, Thorne's right-hand thug, a towering beast of a human, and he'd received a vicious gash on the forehead before Belagus was down. The cut had left a scar on McCroy's features that would stay with him forever, Garrus now saw.

"Anyway, man," McCroy said, brushing his thick blond bangs over his forehead as though self-conscious, "how's life on Baker Street treating you?"

"About as well as can be expected," Garrus said, leaning into the driver's side window.

"Yeah," Mickey said, taking the cigarette from his mouth, flicking it twice to kill the burn and placing it in an empty can inside the car, "Argyle's something else."

Someone else was in the vehicle with McCroy, sitting across from him, dappled in the shade of the evergreen, heavily leaf-laden trees outside overhanging the windshield. His new partner, Garrus supposed.

The other human, a man with a permanent scowl and a receding hairline, nodded at Garrus with a sneer.

Garrus returned his gaze to McCroy. "I'd rather be in the thick of it again, Mickey."

"I know," McCroy said, "dreams of making Spectre and all. It'll happen, Pluto, just keep at it."

The other man snickered.

Garrus' eyes narrowed. "Did you want to say something?"

"Pluto," the man said in a voice about as slick as gravel.

"Yeah," McCroy said, "it's a thing. Y'know; McCroy, Mickey, and he was my first extraterrestrial partner…" his voice trailed off as he caught the look on the other man's face.

"And?"

"And Pluto is a giant chunk of ice in your solar system," Garrus finished.

The man leaned his head forward to get a better look at Garrus. He said, "Pluto's a dog, turian. Mickey Mouse's faithful mutt."

Garrus didn't know who Mickey Mouse was, only that McCroy had told him when they'd started working together in earnest, after the first week or two of awkwardness, that he'd always been called 'Mickey' by friends, and soon after he'd started calling Garrus, 'Pluto.' But he knew what a dog was, and he knew when he was being mocked.

"Nah, man, it wasn't like that. Look Garrus, this is Harkin, my new heavyweight burden; Harkin, Garrus Vakarian, Spectre-in-training," McCroy said.

Harkin didn't offer a hand. Garrus didn't either.

"I think we've met before," Harkin said, "residential sector thirteen, 'bout…three years ago? I beat you to the punch on a domestic that turned into a murder-suicide."

"…Yes, that's right."

"Yeah, you threw a temper-tantrum on their lawn cause HQ wouldn't let you go inside while the guy was threatening her."

Garrus felt a blush crawling under his rough skin. "I could've saved her."

Harkin stared at him for a long moment, that half-sneer stuck on his face. There was something in his eyes, a menacing thought, perhaps stuck between the synapses in his brain and his tongue. McCroy shifted in his seat, looking between them.

Then Harkin shrugged. "Ah, well, not a big loss. Just a worthless, drug-addicted turian and an asari whore, and they aren't really women anyway, are they?"

At the looks he got from McCroy and Garrus, he laughed, loud and hard. He nudged McCroy sharply with his shoulder. "C'mon, I'm kidding!"

McCroy laughed too now, though it sounded forced, and he was unable to meet Garrus' eye.

Harkin took a soft, silver pack of _Xena_'s cigarettes from the dashboard and shook it loosely until one popped up.

McCroy, apparently seeking an opportunity to occupy himself with something besides being in the middle of this quickly-building tension, followed suit, offering one to Garrus as well.

"You know, Harkin, there was another time our paths crossed," Garrus said, taking the cigarette. He leaned into the window and McCroy lit the end for him.

He could still spot Harkin's mean-spirited grin from behind the flame of the lighter he was using. "Oh yeah?"

"Yes; C-Sec's Agryphora Ball, back in seventy-five. You spilled liquor on my uniform as you passed by me. By accident, of course."

Harkin's brow narrowed, and for the first time Garrus saw what it really looked like when Harkin scowled.

"I doubted you'd done it on purpose," Garrus continued undeterred, "after all, anyone that drunk, making as big of a fool of themselves as you did, shouldn't be held accountable as to where they spill their drinks."

"Say!" McCroy shouted, laughing nervously and clapping his hands, "that's quite the flamethrower you got there, man. I haven't seen a lighter like that since I left Earth."

"Huh?" Harkin's angered focus on Garrus broken, he glanced down at the lighter in his palm. "Oh yeah, it's a beaut'," he said uneasily.

McCroy took the lighter and inspected it, close enough for Garrus to catch a glimpse. Silver, square, solidly constructed; Palaven.

"Hey, Vakarian!" Farkus called out behind him. "We'd better get back or the Lieutenant'll throw a fit!"

"Yeah," McCroy said, "we'd better get going too. Gotta see if we can catch some bad guys today."

Garrus nodded. "Sure, Mickey. Try not to get yourself shot again."

"Yeah, hey-", he grabbed Garrus around the wrist, "don't let yourself fall too far down the rabbit hole, okay? Just hang in there for me, Pluto; someone will give you a hand up."

CITADEL  
THE WARDS

(_present day_)

Garrus found himself floating amongst the debris. His wrist hurt, the pressure around it like a vice grip.

_I'm dead. Or… I'm not dead. Falling, though. No, not even falling. Why am I not falling?_

"A -_huff-huff- _little help here?!"

He looked up.

A blond man, shrouded in darkness but backlit by the fires, the corners of his forehead wrinkled from the serious strain of holding Garrus, was hanging halfway into the crevice.

_He must've known I was here, ran to help, lunged for me when I fell._

Garrus felt light-headed.

"Okay, then. I'll just -_oof-eeeehk-_ pull both of us …out!" The man grunted, huffed, and moved up. Garrus was surprised to find he was moving too.

Then, as his line of sight hit the fires that had spread throughout the destruction of the Wards, the dizziness passed and realization hit. Garrus moved, grabbing hold of the edge of the steel abyss and, with the help of his rescuer, pulled himself back onto the tortured ground.

He landed on his stomach breathing hard, the blond man on his knees gasping next to him.

"You're dead, Mickey," Garrus said between breaths. He laughed.

The other man shook his head. "Jesus, you're delirious," he said gruffly, quietly, "no help at all."

"I'm not delirious. I'm in pain." Garrus sighed and, with some effort, pushed himself up on his good knee. "I believe I've fractured my leg."

"Oh, thank God, you're not insane."

"Not at the moment." At a closer glance now that he wasn't dangling above certain death, the blond man did bear a slight resemblance to Daniel McCroy, but only that. He was bigger, showing the muscles and scars and cut of a Marine, with broad shoulders and a strong jaw. He was wearing civilian clothes, though; the red and white-striped, wide-lapelled suit of a pleasure rider; possibly passing through the Citadel on vacation, the right place at the wrong time. "Who are you?"

"My name is Jordan. Jordan Falks."

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*

CITADEL  
THE HALLS OF LEGEND

Around the time Garrus was shaking hands with a man named Jordan Falks, Merl Orthanc was running full speed through a broken glass doorway at the end of the maintenance tunnels into the blazing light of the largest computer bank he'd ever seen. Towering, twenty-foot high rows of electronic processors stretched as far as his wide eyes could see.

"Oh." He stopped, stunned. "Oh, my."

The ceiling was a dome colored gold, the outer rim hundreds of feet in the air, the center of the dome lost to sight, it's height left to the imagination. The walls and floor were made of an alloy he wasn't familiar with. As he took a tentative step forward, he felt a heavy thrum of electric energy surrounding his feet and ankles and waist and chest, until finally the energy enveloped him entirely.

Every few yards a row of databanks would end and another would begin. The further in he walked, the thicker the air seemed to get, sometimes forcing him to stop and catch his breath from the simple exertion of walking. Not that he took much notice of this.

Like wandering the stacks in a library, lost in a sense of wonder and awe, Merl walked in a daze through the rows, occasionally running his fingers over golden dials and steel-gray faceplates and steadily blinking lights of green and yellow and the brightest purple, his sure-footed, insane chase for the voice of destruction nearly forgotten when he stumbled upon the wreckage of a transit vehicle amidst the processors.

At a crossroad of four damaged towers, their edges and electronic innards scarred black and sparking occasionally, Merl knelt by the cab and inspected it.

_From this angle…_

Merl's eyes shot up to the dome, tracing the path the fallen transit vehicle had taken. There, a hundred meters up, a spot of black and red in the gold of the dome. Back to the cab itself, Merl got slowly down on his knees and reached inside the crushed interior, starting to dig into the jumble of twisted metal, ripped leather and a rainbow assortment of bundled wires.

_Odd,_ Merl thought, _regulator cables, CPS coupling, automated response circuit board, all busted._ All purposely ripped out **before** the vehicle had crashed. This had been an automated transit vehicle, running on a set path and allowing only a few select locations to travel to within a limited radius. The passenger would get in, bring up the Citadel ATS on the nav-screen and choose which destination they wanted from a preset list.

Someone had jumped into the cab and, with prior knowledge and professional technique, disabled the automated travel, taken out the speed cap so they could drive at their own pace, and removed the navigational monitor from its CPU. Then they'd driven the vehicle as far as it would go, perhaps trying to escape the Citadel.

Merl wondered if the quakes had effected the people up-top. He bit his lip, his slick fingers grazing the nav-screen in his hands.

_It would only take a second…_

Merl dropped to his knees by the wreck, one hand on the monitor, the other rummaging through the wires. If the nav-screen was able to be operated on its own, separate from the transit cabs… a snap of the wires-

"Gotcha!" Merl exclaimed.

The nav-screen blipped, rolled and a menu popped up.

"Excuse me. What are you doing?" An ethereal voice asked him.

"Just a second," Merl responded absent-mindedly, his tongue stuck in concentrated effort between his teeth. "I just want to see where they came from, where they were headed."

"I need your help."

"Uh-huh, you got it, just one…more…THERE!" Merl cried exuberantly, his fingers traveling through broken code on the nav-screen. "Looks like; huh, Chora's Den to the C-Sec Academy. After that, they ripped out the navigation and were headed to… now this is just a guess based on the trajectory of the vehicle before the crash… either headquarters, the barracks, or the evidence vault. The evidence vau-"

"HEY!"

Suddenly realizing he wasn't simply talking to himself, Merl jumped and screamed.

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*

CITADEL  
C-SEC ACADEMY  
DIGITAL VIDEO ARCHIVE

Liara grasped the mic in her hand, watching the salarian on one of over three hundred screens available to her, each capable of accessing at least forty cameras across the presidium, and tried to remain calm.

"Excuse me, please stop that."

The salarian continued to scream, twirling around in an attempt to catch sight of the person talking to him.

"You have to stop doing that, we don't have time for flailing panic."

Four screens down and two to the left, a crumpled form continued to catch Liara's eye.

"Listen, you-you idiot! If you don't stop screaming I'll…well, I'll shoot you."

The salarian stopped, dropped to his knees, covered his head with his hands and began to cry. "Please, don't shoot, I'm not armed, I'm just a computer analyst, I'm sorry I came in here, there was this massive moaning thing and the door was open; well, busted, but honestly, I just wanted to help!" He looked up from beneath his hands. "I just wanted to help!"

"Oh, Goddess, I'm sorry, that was the wrong idle threat to make," Liara backpedaled, "Look, you need to help me, all right? I need your help, very badly."

The salarian stopped crying, stopped shaking. He looked up a bit farther from his cowering stance. "Did you say, 'idle threat'?"

"Yes," Liara said, relieved, "yes, I'm in the C-Sec vidlog archive, I'm watching you through a camera. I'm just a scientist, I-"

"You're asari?"

"Yes."

"And you can't shoot me?"

"No."

"Oh. Good then." He got to his feet. Smoothed his suit out. "Are you a civilian?"

"Not exactly. Listen to me, I need you to walk six rows east. Run it if you can."

He started to walk. "Hey, if you're in the archive, do you think you could find Sami, I just want to make sure he's okay, you know, I really am an analyst-wait, why do you need me to walk six rows east?"

"Because there's a human woman lying unconscious not far from you and if you don't help her I really will find you and hurt you!"

"Fine, fine, got it!" Merl started to trot east.

"Good, now walk three rows to the north," Liara said, trying to keep her voice at a calm, normal level.

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*

CITADEL  
THE HALLS OF LEGEND

Wrex stumbled for the fifth or sixth time against one of the blinking towers. He growled and shook his head, trying to clear the cobwebs from his mind, to shake himself out of the daze he'd been in since the crash.

After leaving Chora's Den, kicking himself for being so negligent, for being in this situation in the first place, he'd decided to take advantage of the ensuing panic from the quakes and had stolen a transit vehicle. Flying through the district during the quake hadn't been easy; surfing the air directly underneath the falling Hotel Verisota as people on jetpacks escaped through open windows into the sky above him, watching the Wards erupt beneath him, but he hadn't had a problem until he reached the busted C-Sec elevator shaft.

In dismantling the vehicle's safety devices, he must've severed the speed control not only in acceleration, but also _deceleration_. He'd planned on flying straight down and landing on the C-Sec Academy floor, but instead had slammed at an angle into the elevator shaft wall, the ATS vehicle's engine exploding into flames. Then he'd hit something on the way down, been ejected from the vehicle and blacked out.

He'd been surprised, to say the least, when he found himself in this underground electronic hub, alive and relatively unscathed.

But as he'd pushed himself to his feet and began the search for an exit, for something recognizable as a landmark that would lead him to the evidence vault, Wrex' mind had refused to clear through the fog that had settled in. He couldn't find his balance, and the nausea it caused wound its way from his addled brain to his stomach.

He considered the possibility of a concussion.

Finally, and he wasn't sure if this was part of the possible concussion or something he was truly experiencing, but the air in this strange, blinking electrical palace, with its towering, seemingly endless rows of terminals and golden, arcing roof, felt impossibly thick. Like walking on a planet with little to no air, he seemed to be wading through an invisible surf, feeling it envelope him more with every step.

_Whumpf_. Again, Wrex' feet had tripped over each other, he'd lost his balance and fallen against one of the computer towers. The diodes at face-level rubbed against his scaly cheek, digging into the fresh wound Tyson had caused by breaking the bottle of booze beating him.

"Salarian scum," he whispered in a thick, slurred rasp, leaning into the tower, "I'll kill him."

"Excuse me. What are you doing?" A familiar voice asked softly from the dome above him.

He forced his eyes to look up. "Huh?"

Then, a moment later, "I need your help."

Wrex growled, the side of his face still pressed to the tower. "Liara?" She didn't respond. He was imagining things.

"Did you say something?"

Another voice! This time it was also an asari, although somewhere nearby, and definitely not Liara's.

Wrex struggled hard to focus, the fog lifting just a bit. _I'm going crazy,_ he thought. _I'm not actually here. I'm still at the crash site, lying amongst the debris, concussed and dying._

Or perhaps not. He pushed himself off of the tower, hurried to a break in the row and took a left.

"Who?" Yet another asari, this one with a lower voice, but still unmistakably asarian.

"Tully; I thought he growled something."

Wrex lurched forward, dodging and ducking through the rows, his predatory instincts keeping his footfalls silent now, his steps not quite surefooted, but quick and heated.

He was approaching a strange metal wall, an end to the unbelievably massive room he'd been wandering through.

Another voice spoke, this one gruff and biting. "I said hurry up, Anires, or we'll never get out of these damned tunnels!" A turian, or possibly a human.

_Criminals?_ Wrex questioned. _They sound the part, but may be just valiant, hard-living survivor types._ He doubted this. Concussion or not, his battle-honed instincts were not to be taken lightly.

"Give us a break, Tully," the second voice again, "how fast can we go with Marvin all jazzed up on Hice?"

_There!_ A break in the wall, a doorway, busted glass littering the floor, the voices ever-so-close now, only feet away.

"This one's fading high does not keep us at this drawling pace, blue one, it is perhaps instead your sister-kin's impossibly rotund backside." A hanar.

"That's it. Call my ass fat one more time, you little airborne blob, see what happens!"

Wrex side-stepped the glass, pulling a small handgun out from a holster on his back, edging towards the door-

"HEY!" The voice above the gigantic hall cried out.

-his feet tangling suddenly at the outburst, one clawed foot slipping into the air, _SHIT-SHIT-SHIT!_ Wrex stumbled past the last of the glass, unable to catch himself, twisted his body and slammed his back against the wall adjacent to the opening.

Three sets of feet moved quickly in response, separating from each other, one of them with talons for toes. Not sure if the voice had caught their attention or if it had been his clumsiness, Wrex leaned against the wall and pointed the pistol at the doorway. Several guns cocked on the other side, a vibrant blue light colored the entryway momentarily and a humming sound filled his ears, intermittently broken up by zaps of electricity.

At least four bodies. Two asari, one hanar and one barefooted turian. Two of the three humanoids were armed with assault rifles with charged handles, while one of them carried a handgun with a slide-action bolt, most likely a semi-automatic pistol. All three had just thrown up personal barriers while the hanar had built up a shot of electricity within his outer layer of flesh. If he were to spot Wrex, that entire lightning bolt would be focused on him.

For a moment, nobody moved. In the sudden silence, Wrex thought he heard a distant screaming, like that of a frightened child.

Then a boot scraped on glass, and Wrex focused once more on the door, trying to flatten himself against the wall as much as he could.

An attractive asari with a scar on her left cheek poked her head past the doorway. "Wow," she said, getting a good look at the massive room. Her voice was high; it had been the second voice he'd heard while mumbling to himself.

"Anires," the turian growled, "we don't have time for this. We need to get topside, now."

The asari took a step further into the room, the assault rifle appearing now in her right hand, pointed at the floor, stock resting against her wide hip. She was wearing an old, black, short-lapelled Venus jacket that ended just above her ankles. Wrex recognized it; a standard model Venus, a high-velocity bullet-resistant duster worn by asari operatives years ago. It had been phased out and the duster was eventually recycled on the criminal market. This asari wore it open instead of zipped up.

Beneath the jacket; a low-cut, bright red bodysuit imprinted below the breasts with a famous extranet television character Wrex couldn't recall the name of, a white sash around her waist holding several knives and, finally, black leather boots. Civilians didn't dress this way, and that scar on her face wasn't by accident; this was a local gang that had seen some action. Wrex' grip on the pistol tightened.

"But it's beautiful," she said slowly, dazed. Her eyes were now stuck to the gold dome. "It's like, they set all this up…like, all this power…" Another step in. She stood fully in the room now, less than two feet from the gun aimed at her head. If she so much as glanced to her left, Wrex would be in a firefight. "With all of this, you could create a God-"

Her eyes traveled back down to the rows of computer banks. Her face turned to the left, her eyes flicking towards Wrex; a clawed turian hand shot into the room, grabbed her jacket by the short lapel and yanked her roughly back out the doorway.

"Dammit, Anires, we don't have time to investigate every loud voice and 'pretty' room. I said, 'let's go!'"

"Fine! By the Goddess, Tully, you don't have to be so rough all the time." The voices were fading.

Footsteps, three of them, plus the humming and zapping hanar, all exiting stage right. "If I didn't have to repeat myself, I wouldn't have to hurt the three of you so much. I mean, I would anyway, but that's not the point…"

Their voices were just reverberations off the hallway wall now. Wrex sighed, slid down the wall until he was squatting, and hung his head. Now would not have been the best time to shoot and be shot at.

Then the asari, Anires, spoke up again, her voice fading to little more than a whisper, "I just don't get it, Tully, what's Tyson going to give us for one stupid little rag?"

Wrex' face shot up. _…shit._

He ducked around the exit, into the maintenance tunnels.

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*

Alice awoke with a gasp, her hand reaching to her waist for her pistol. She grabbed it, thumbed the hammer back and brought it up to her chest.

"Whoa, don't shoot!"

She was on her back. She sat up, blinking. "Where am I?"

"Apparently, you were hit by a piece of falling debris from a transit vehicle and carried down here. You're safe…for now."

A salarian sat across from her. He looked young, and wore the work suit of a Citadel employee. She set her pistol to her side, careful to ensure it was still within reach. "Where is safe?"

The salarian glanced up. "This is some sort of massive computer database. I just found this place myself."

"Found it?"

"We're deep underground. I work in the data archives, researching and translating the Keepers' knowledge bank. I-"

"You're Merl? Merl Orthanc?"

The salarian looked surprised. "Yes! How did you-"

"I'm Alliance. We got your message."

Merl grimaced, looked back up, annoyed. "You could have told me that!"

A voice responded. "I'm sorry, I didn't know who you were." _Liara!_

"Liara! Where are you? Are you okay?"

"I'm in the C-Sec video archives, I'm watching you now. I'm fine, but Shepard, listen, I've seen it. Well, part of it anyway."

"Seen what?"

"Whatever it is that's tearing up this district. I saw it digging its way up through the floors. All blue flesh and a fin. Shepard, it's massive, twice the size of a thresher maw."

Alice ran one hand through her hair. "You don't recognize it from your studies?"

"No. It's like nothing I've ever seen before."

"Nobody has ever seen it before," Merl said grimly.

Shepard locked eyes with him, her gaze intense. "What? What do you know?"

"Only what I've researched while in the archives. The manual they gave us before we started doesn't say much, because there's not much known yet. The Citadel has only just begun studying the Keepers and what they knew, and while they've gained a lot in such a short time, they still don't understand most of what they're reading."

"They who?"

Merl sighed. "My bosses. I'm serving time- look, it's not important. What is important, is that this thing- it wasn't supposed to be alive. I mean, for frak's sake, we thought it was a computer virus!"

Alice took the gun and holstered it, scooted over to where Merl sat with his back against a terminal and smacked him on the forehead.

"Ow!" Merl cried, "-the heck was that for?"

"Start making sense. Now."

Merl rubbed his forehead, scowling at her like a scolded child. "…it's called Legend. It's as old as the Citadel, I guess, placed here as a defense mechanism in case the Keepers were all wiped out. Early on into my research, I discovered that many of the protocols tied to the Legend system had been damaged in Saren's attack on the Citadel."

"Damaged how?"

"Legend thought that Saren and the Reapers had won, that the Keepers were still alive and functioning. If all protocols had been broken, if the system showed as non-functional on all areas, Legend would have woken up immediately, and we would have had another thing to worry about the day after you killed Saren and Sovereign, when all of the Keepers were removed from their posts."

Alice raised an eyebrow. "You know who I am?"

Merl nodded. "Yeah. I watched the newsvids." His expression turned sour and he cocked his head to one side. "And here I find out you're just as much of a self-aggrandizing bully as I thought you were."

Alice couldn't fight the smile. "Yeah, that's what I keep telling people. Isn't that right?" She asked loudly.

"Merl," Liara responded coolly, ignoring the Spectre for the moment, "we still don't know what Legend is."

"Neither did I, until today. Like I said, I thought it was a computer virus, built to respond to an attack on the Citadel systems. There's a piece of garbled code that was damaged beyond repair in the initial attack, some sort of Keeper riddle at the digital gateway to Legend's fortress. I was only able to glean ten words from the broken code. 'Legend will blacken the sky in search of the song.'"

Alice frowned, getting to her feet. "What does that mean?"

"Well, as it turns out it's a very literal warning."

Liara jumped in. "Something has made Legend realize that the Keepers are no longer in control, and it's destroying this entire district trying to get out!"

Merl shook his head. "Not something. Someone."

Alice grabbed Merl by the arm and yanked him off his butt, forcing him to stand face-to-face with her. "What?"

From the microphone, Liara gasped. "The birdsong!"

Merl smiled bitterly. "Exactly. Someone's been broadcasting the Keepers' emergency sequence digitally coded into birdsong. Someone who either knew or figured it out that this was the last bastion standing between us and the Legend system."

"Where is this system?"

"My guess," Merl said, "you're standing in it."

They both looked up at the expansive space above them.

"The dome," Alice said softly.

"These terminals fed Legend information, maybe kept it in contact with the Reapers, or at the very least the Keepers. It stayed here quietly for eons, floating in it's electric ocean, waiting to hear the birds sing. Then, today, it heard them singing topside and started working it's, way, up," Merl said, punctuating the last three words by thrusting his webbed pointer finger farther and farther up.

Alice slid her arm down to his wrist and tightened her grip. Then she turned and began to pull him through the aisles.

"What are you doing," he asked, suddenly frightened. _No, not frightened_, Shepard noted, _he's cautious, so he's faking fear_.

She stopped, turned to him.

"Where are you taking me," he asked, voice quavering, lips trembling, eyes wide.

_It's a natural ability for him_, Shepard thought. _He's never been taught how to fake emotion this well, he just knows instinctively._

She reached out with her free hand and smacked him in the forehead.

"OWCH!" He cried, the fear immediately gone. "Would you stop that?" He rubbed his forehead again.

"Hmm, you'll have to work on staying consistent," Alice said, smirking, and began to drag him again.

"What?"

"Nothing. Liara," Shepard called out.

"Yes, Shepard." Her voice sounded withdrawn, sad even.

"Have you seen Wrex or Garrus on any of the monitors?"

"No. The security cameras in the wards are all offline, and when I saw you lying on the floor like that… I suppose my priorities shifted, Commander."

"Fine. Can you get to an emergency stairwell from the C-Sec archives?"

"Yes, that's how I got here."

"Good, I've got my guide, we'll meet you there. We need to get topside and find a way to stop Legend."

"Shepard."

Alice slowed down, craned her neck back, her eyes searching the dome as though she could possibly find Liara's face somewhere up there. "Yes?"

"I'm…I'm glad you're okay."

"Me too. I'll see you up-top."

There was a loud, abrupt clicking sound, and the connection with Liara was gone.

"What was that about?" Merl asked as she forced him to walk ahead of her.

"Nothing. My girlfriend is upset with me because I keep pushing her out of the way when horribly large objects come falling out of the sky to crush us both. Apparently, I'm being rude."

Merl nodded, leading the way freely now. "Yeah? Do you smack her around before you push her, cause you kind of have a problem with that too."

Alice pushed him in the back, causing him to stumble and catch his balance. "Just keep walking, Merl. I think you're all talked out for awhile."

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*

CITADEL  
UNDERGROUND MAINTENANCE TUNNELS  
EMERGENCY STAIRWELLS/ELEVATOR SHAFT

The Citadel was the largest non-planetary habitation in the explored galaxies. It had a bigger population than thirty-eight percent of inhabited planets. It's bustling economy, relatively safe living environment (until recently) and renowned trade center made it a staple of the current state of the known Traverse. The newfound knowledge that the Citadel had been a tool of the Reapers wasn't going to change this in a matter of weeks. Therefore, it still had to be kept in proper working order at all times.

The maintenance tunnels beneath the Citadel were large, and connected via ducts and passages and terminals to every residential, industrial and political sector of the Citadel. Every section of every sector had anywhere from six to eighteen emergency stairwells located within five kilometers from each other, and they were all built from the strongest alloys available. If a crack appeared in the foundation or walls, the entire stairwell would be reinforced within two weeks.

And yet, on any given workday, you'd be hard-pressed to find more than ten to fifteen people working in the tunnels at a time. You could easily go your whole day without seeing anyone. During the rare emergency, the tunnels were vacated within minutes.

Sami knew all of this. He'd known it his whole life, it seemed. So when the opportunity had presented itself, he'd had absolutely no problem with running full-barrel up the stairs without hesitation or keeping about him any sense of what was going on in the world around him. He passed landing after landing, entrance after entrance just trying to reach topside, his feet slap, slap, slapping on the steps, his breath blowing out and sucking in at an alarming rate and his eyes bugging to the point that it physically hurt to try and focus on any one thing.

At least until someone forced a door open in his way and he slammed face-first into it. Then Sami only had to focus on the blissful darkness and silence that comes from knocking yourself completely unconscious.

Liara poked her head around the corner of the door. She stared down at the fallen salarian. "Oh…damn it."

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*

"This one's appendages grow tired, sir."

Tully stopped halfway up the next flight of steps, breathing hard. He looked down at Marvin incredulously. "You…you float, Marv. How can you be tired?"

"This one's appendages are, um, mentally strained."

Anires stomped up the steps below Marvin, stopping behind him. "Mentally strained," she wheezed, "right. Well, the muscles in my legs are on fire; I'd trade a little mental strain for sore muscles any day."

Tully chuckled. "Seriously. Oh, poor Marvin, his tendrils get mental strains."

"Please! This one wishes not to be discriminated against. This one is also very, very tired."

"You're not even out of breath!" Anires said, doubled over with a cramp.

"This one does not have breaths, exactly, because it does not have lungs, specifically."

Tully leaned off the balustrade, his breaths still short and a wide, leering smile between his mandibles. "Gosh, Marv. No muscles, no lungs, you've got it sooo bad. I tell you what, Anires, let's stop here and throw a pity party for Marvin, right now."

Anires grinned. "I'll get the party hats." She poked Marvin in his back. "Poor, poor Marvin's pity party."

The hanar began to vibrate in his fury. "This one does not _want_ a pity party! This one has never even _attended_ a pity party!"

Anires poked him again, about to provoke him further when a gunshot blasted her in the shoulder, throwing her against the gray stairwell wall.

"Fuck!" Tully yelled, tugging his automatic rifle out from beneath his jacket.

Marvin flew over Anires, hovering above her as she tried to recover from the pain of the shot, ripples of electricity tracing along his body. "Try it again!" The hanar shouted angrily in its ethereal tone, "this one dares the other to show itself and try it again!"

Tully pulled the handle back on his rifle, checked the barrel and slid it forward, then leaned over the balustrade, looking straight down into the descending square of the space between the stairwell.

From three floors down, a krogan holding a pistol looked back up at him. It fired a second shot.

Tully yelped in pain, the rifle flying from his hands with a bullet hole in the stock. The weapon flipped and twirled in the air like an airborne ballerina, the barrel struck the metal guardrail and the gun clattered it's way down the stairwell, beyond their sight.

"Give me the rag, turian," the krogan shouted. "And I let your little gang walk away unharmed!"

Marvin zapped a shot of electricity down at him. Then another and another.

Anires, stumbling back to her feet, weapon in hand, leaned over the railing beside Marvin with her face looking back at the wall and fired blindly downwards.

Tully pulled a handgun out of a jacket pocket and followed Anires' lead, firing off more rounds in the direction the krogan had been.

After a few seconds, the three of them stopped firing.

Silence.

Anires barked a quiet laugh of relief. "I think we got him," she whispered.

Tully glanced between her and Marvin, then leaned quickly over the railing and popped back up.

Still no one fired back.

He looked over again, this time really looking.

No one. Two, three, four floors down, he saw and heard nothing. Either they'd gotten him or he'd run off.

"Dammit," Tully said under his breath, "my lucky rifle."

"What are you three doing?!"

Tully and Anires pasted themselves against their respective walls, terrified. Marvin shook violently.

Three stories up, Serina stared down at them, a fine sheen of sweat covering her face. "I was ten floors up before I realized you weren't even behind me anymore. Thanks for letting me know we were stopping, you jerks!"

Tully let out a long, heavy sigh, grabbing at his chest. "Your shoulder alright?"

Anires nodded, rubbing the spot where she'd been shot. "Yeah. Apparently the sucker had never heard of a Venus jacket before."

Tully frowned, thinking back on the altercation. "Maybe… Let's get the fuck out of here."

She nodded. The three of them began to speed up the staircase towards Serina.

"And did I hear gunshots?" She asked the three of them angrily as they approached her.

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*

"C'mon," Jordan shouted down to him, "it's just a little bit further!"

Garrus nodded, his breath coming in short, hard gasps as he clung to the lift cable of the elevator shaft. The blond human had proved himself resourceful in their escape from the wreckage of the wards. Now, in this final leg, every time the pain in his wounds seemed on the verge of becoming too much to bear, Falks would spur him on and keep him from falling back.

It _was_ rough going, though. The cable bit into the soft-scaled palms of his hands with every move upwards and he'd been forced to cross his legs to maintain a decent hold below, which was absolute torment on the fractured femur.

"Garrus, I see light!" Jordan cried excitedly, a hint of weariness in his voice coating the jubilance. "I can see the exit to the shaft!"

"Great," Garrus huffed back, feeling as though he'd just caught his thirty-second wind. "But I thought you said that three floors ago."

"Yeah, I was lying," Jordan said cheerily, "you were starting to lag behind again."

Before Garrus could begin to question him on the possibility of this being another lie, he spotted the pale light as well. It was roughly six floors ahead.

He pulled himself up another foot.

In front of his face, Garrus' omni-tool blinked back to life.

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*

With Marvin a few steps ahead of her, Anires slowed her pace again. Her feet just didn't want to walk any more. Her thighs burned, her calves ached and the cramp in her side was causing her breath to hitch with every deep gulp of air she took in.

The constant gray walls and stone steps of the stairwell gave her the impression of being caught in a never-ending loop, and though she was sure there could only be twenty or so floors left to ascend, a cold fear had settled into her gut. She felt certain that she was going to die on these stairs, trapped forever beneath the surface of the Citadel.

Anires came to a full stop when she reached the beginning of the next floor. Eighteen floors left. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees, taking in slow, controlled breaths, calming her heart rate.

Something scraped along the floor a level beneath her.

Anires turned, smacked her back against the wall, reached into her jacket and put one blue hand around the grip of her weapon. Her other hand was thrust out in front of her, the air beyond it shimmering with the potential destructive force of her mind.

The blood pounded behind her ears, and she realized she was gasping.

From her viewpoint, she could see the stairs leading up to the next level, the railing and the stairs going down. Pressed against the wall as she was, she couldn't see what stood on the floor below her, though she knew it had to be the krogan. It _had_ to be.

But she wasn't ready to have her face blown off checking to be sure.

"Marvin!" She cried out in a frantic whisper, "Marvin, get down here!"

The hanar didn't respond. Had he already climbed too far up to hear her pleas?

"Marv-" her voice cracked an octave higher with fear. She cleared her throat, then tried again in a louder tone, "Marvin?"

Nothing. The hanar, her sister and Tully were too many floors ahead of her.

Slowly, Anires brought her rifle out from within her jacket and up to bear, slipping her other hand under the barrel cover. She took a short breath and slid forward to the banister, the floor beneath her slowly revealing itself.

A wall…

A metal door set into the cement in the middle of the wall…

And a walkway across the door…an empty walkway.

She was alone.

Anires shot out a breath of relief between her lips, the deep creases in her forehead relaxing. She dropped the weapon to her side. One corner of her mouth turned up in a half-smile of self-reproach.

She turned to continue up the stairwell, her leather boots speaking softly as they twisted and strained-

And Anires smacked into the armor-plated chest of the krogan. His red eyes gleamed at her with the promise of violence and pain, his reptilian face grim with purpose.

Her eyes widened, her hand went slack around the grip of the weapon it held.

The krogan brought his short hands up and cradled her face. His claws dug into the plush roundness of her cheeks.

"How-how did you-?"

One deceptively small claw delicately traced the old scar on her cheek.

"You're not fat," it growled, so softly that she almost couldn't hear the words. "You're pretty, you know? Shouldn't let the hanar get you down after this. Not even about the nose."

She trembled. "What? What's wrong with my no-"

His hand slipped into the soft tendrils on the back of her head. She didn't have time to finish her question.

He turned her with a simple flick of his wrist, jerking her head to the right. Then he slammed her face into the drab, gray wall. Her nose snapped and she tasted blood. Her eyes rolled in her head.

He pulled her to him quickly, long enough for her to see the blood from her face smeared along the wall, then drove her viciously back into it. As her head snapped against the cement a second time, Anires slipped away from the world around her and fell into the dark.

Her body crumpled to his feet.

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*

"-you've never seen a Kilabur? Never?"

"Shut up, Merl."

"But it just doesn't seem possible. It's a great big furry mammal, with tusks that come out to here," he held his hands out in front of his face, "and two pouches to carry its young on its sides, and it's got opposable thumbs like us, but it only uses them the stitch together the skin of its victims to make decorative quilts-"

"Merl!"

"Fine, fine. …it's just so unlikely, you know? That you haven't run across _any_ of the creatures I've read about. I mean, how many planets have you been to?"

"Merl, I swe-," the Spectre stopped herself, considering this. "You know, I've lost count, actually."

Merl looked crestfallen. "So there's really nothing out there, then?"

"No, no. Look, it's not like that. I mean, we're a military unit, dropping into a location on any given planet with a purpose to accomplish, a mission to complete."

The circular ceiling lights they passed under dimmed briefly and flickered, then returned to full life.

"Eventually it all begins to blend together," Shepard continued. "The settings might change, but there are really only three things to look out for. One, the thresher maw- no problem. The ground shakes seconds before it strikes from beneath you; we can avoid that. Two, the armed geth or sentient forces, which you can usually spot kilometers away cause they're always huddled in close quarters. So sometimes we can avoid them too."

Merl stopped in his tracks and turned to her, putting a hand on her arm. His eyes were large with fear and anticipation. "And the V.O.U.S.'es?"

Shepard smirked. "Varrens of unusual size? I don't think they exist."

Her omni-tool blinked and beeped rapidly.

Merl's face fell once more.

"Look," she said, sounding conciliatory as she brought the omni up and connected out of reflex, "I'm not saying the worlds out there aren't interesting, Merl, we just don't have time to stop and 'ooh' and 'ahh' over the local wildlife, 'kay?" Then, into the tool on her wrist, "Go for Shepard."

"Commander." The voice that crackled through was distinctly turian, and very familiar to her ears.

"Garrus!" Shepard barked his name, the mixture of anger and relief clear in her voice. "You mother-…are you alright?"

"I'll need to see the doctor when we're out of this mess, but I'm breathing. And I'm out of the Wards."

"Fantastic. New rule, by the way; you and Wrex will no longer be allowed out of my sight again until I can trust you not to be in the wrong place at the worst possible time."

"I'm flattered, Shepard. It's always nice to feel needed."

"We'll see how flattered you are when I'm following you into the john, Vakarian."

Merl, watching her, narrowed his eyes, his expression confused. The silence from the other end of the omni-tool was all the reply she got, and it felt decidedly awkward.

Shepard reflected on the words that had just left her mouth. She sighed. "To watch you, Garrus. To watch- _damn it_, I just meant that you're not leaving my sight. Do you understand?"

"I suppose, Commander. Do you have orders for me?"

"That depends. Have you still got your sniper rifle?"

"Of course. For what good it would do in this situation. What did you have in mind?"

"Standby," Alice told him. She eyed Merl. "If we found the source of this, this birdcall, this code that's controlling Legend, do you think you could stop it? Destroy it?"

Merl took a deep breath. "It's possible, I guess, if-"

The spectre raised her hand and stepped towards him menacingly.

"Yeah-yes, definitely, if it's an electronic device it's putty in my hands."

She stared at him appraisingly for a long moment, then nodded. "Garrus, you're going hunting."

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*

Marvin couldn't do it. He just couldn't hold it in anymore. The Hice, delightful treasure though it was, always made him like this. He felt alternately tired, wired and overexerted. But mostly he just felt the pressure built up in that small, hard organ at the bottom-left side of his body. He checked the floor number he was on.

_Only ten floors left_.

He concentrated on the door in front of him. It clicked, hummed and slid open.

"Marvin!"

He shivered in frustration, then turned to the voice of his boss. One floor up, Tully and Serina glared down at him.

"Yes?"

"Where are you going?" Tully demanded angrily.

"This one must relieve itself. Presently, sir."

Tully scoffed and waved his hand in dismissal. "Just hurry, will you?"

"Have you seen, Anires?" Serina cut in, worry clear in her deep voice.

"Yes, yes, just behind us," Marvin lied, slipping through the door. He hadn't seen the angry girl in ten floors or so, and he _was_ somewhat stressed about this fact, but if he'd told her sibling the truth, that one would have demanded they retrace their steps until they found the overweight asari trudging up slowly, and by that point Marvin might have done some serious damage to his innards by ignoring this pressing problem.

It wasn't his fault. It was the Hice. Glorious stuff. But it gave his priorities the bad touch sometimes. Scrambled them around, so he wasn't always focusing on the right thing. This could've been one of those times. Marvin wasn't sure.

Farther down the hallway of the tenth floor, Marvin found a multi-species restroom near a boiler surrounded by a rusted steel gate and a wall completely filled by blueprints.

Floating into the waste-room, Marvin immediately caught sight of a large, hulking figure waiting for him inside, its skin pulsing and its body moving quickly alongside his-

He shrieked, his naturally ethereal voice reverberating back at him from the dark walls of the small room. His body twisted to the left, instinct taking over as he turned to face his enemy head-on.

Marvin was staring at his own reflection in a full-length mirror that covered the wall above several washbasins the humanoids utilized to clean the waste particles from their hands and claws. He floated there, watching himself, waiting for the calm of realization to wash over him. He gave his reflection a deeper examination.

Hanar were genetically predisposed to have ruddy, radiant skin and tentacles. The thick flesh of his species at times glowed neon pink or orange in the light of the sun. They were, quite literally, a blindingly beautiful people. Marvin had been no exception to this. In his rearing years, he'd been fawned over a handful of times by the other kids, the turian and human girls especially finding him pleasing to the eye and touch.

Things changed. Marvin changed. His skin now, while still pulsing lightly, had lost its luster. Gone was the full, healthy color, the sheen of reddish-pink, replaced with splotches of dull brown and russet amidst a covering of pallid silver and gray hues. Hice effected each species differently, he supposed.

It had given him the rush of his young life countless times, while sucking it from his flesh and body. His tentacles, once round and full, now resembled large tapeworms, twisting and fluttering pathetically in the air below his bulky frame.

Anires had called him a slug a few days back, when they'd been loitering outside of one of the many reconstruction yards. Repulsive, she'd said. She'd laughed when he'd threatened her in response, told her to stop, that he'd get off the junk when he wanted to.

Looking at his unhealthy reflection now, Marvin cursed himself for protecting her in the stairwell. He'd done it without thinking, anger rushing through him at the krogan who'd shot her. Now, he found himself wishing the bullet had been on-target, that it had found its way through her cruel, miserable face and out the back of her skull.

"No," he whispered. He forced the thoughts away. The drug was wearing off, and he was coming down hard. That was all. Anires was fine, and he'd be glad about that in a while.

He passed by the human/turian/asari stall and the salarian stall to find the hanar waste cubicle situated, oddly enough, between the volus and batarian receptacles. He didn't understand why they hadn't replaced the batarian receptacle by now, years after they'd fled the Citadel for the Verge.

Once finished, he felt a little better. The blazing pressure in his lower body was gone, and the crash from the Hice was now simply leaving him mildly depressed.

As he made his way towards the exit, the air in front of the door shimmered.

Marvin shouted, electricity zapped along his skin and less then a second later several blue and white bolts shot out from his body. They hit their target straight ahead of him.

The krogan's cloaking device stuttered as his body flew backwards, his form blinking between visible and vanishing several times before he slammed into the restroom door and it shut off completely. He slid down the door.

The beast sat there on the floor for a moment, stunned. His legs were bent at the knees, his arms rested between them, cradling a pistol and an assault rifle. _Anires' rifle?_

"This one will end you now, krogan scum." Marvin's skin began to charge again.

The krogan's eyes flicked towards him then and his lip curled up in a sneer as he regained his breath. He lunged to the right, next to the mirror.

Marvin darted quickly around him and released a second volley of electricity.

One shot hit the krogan in his leg, twisting him around bodily. He cried out in a deep growl and fell on his humped back.

One bolt smashed into a washbasin and the other two hit the mirror above it. The mirror and sink exploded into shards of glass and white ceramic that pelted the krogan and the hanar. Several jagged slivers cut into Marvin's flesh, a particularly wicked-looking piece from the mirror stabbing straight through one of his front tentacles, a thin line of translucent blood squirting out of him.

_Slug_, Anires spat in his mind.

Water suddenly gushed from the pipes set in the damaged sink, splattering him cold and wet. The shock cleared his mind of the pain.

The krogan was on his feet again, a long but insignificant cut on his forehead and several in his cheeks. He raised the pistol and the rifle and aimed them at Marvin, strafing with a limp to the hanar's right again, his back to the first cubicle.

He didn't fire as Marvin turned on him once more.

"Don't make me kill you, runt," the krogan uttered.

Marvin hesitated at this. Why wasn't he firing?

They stared each other down for a long moment, the water jetting from the broken basin the only sound. It still sprinkled the hanar, streaming down his skin in little rivers, dragging his blood from the cuts with it.

Would the krogan simply let him leave?

Marvin didn't have the chance to find out.

The remaining heft of ceramic that made up the basin crashed to the floor, and the krogan's talons visibly tightened on the triggers of his weapons.

Marvin, startled, charged his body.

The water racing along his skin amplified the charge, which normally would not have harmed the hanar's protective outer-layer, but with the jagged cuts in his flesh, the electricity was sent back into him, stunning him momentarily.

Just long enough for the krogan to pocket the pistol, step towards him, taking Anires' rifle and raising it high above him, then violently striking it down into the part of Marvin's body that housed his brain.

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*

CITADEL  
EMBASSIES

The jetpack sputtered and died as Rickard's thumb left the controls.

He tumbled and rolled on the ground, pain lancing through his right leg as he was forced to put weight on it. The quad that had been whipping past him now steadied and became clear as he stopped rolling, skidding on his butt into a grassy knoll just before the edge of the pond.

His brown shoes skimmed the surface of the water.

It occurred to him that, were this a normal day, he would now appear to be a business man who'd stopped on his way between meetings for a peaceful moment by the water, sitting on a clear spot of grass between the saplings. Almost Rockwellian.

Except he had a jetpack strapped on his back, he was still bleeding from the entrance and exit wounds in his leg, and his crooked, broken nose was lightly streaming fluid down onto his lips and into his open, wincing mouth, and beneath the deep red smeared on his face, his skin was a sickly, blanched white. And now that he noticed, all the colorful fish in the quad glade by the Tower had broken the surface of the water, floating dead along with the flow of the current.

If this was a Rockwell painting, Rockwell was in hell and the darkness was his muse now.

Eyes gazing over the pond, Rickard undid the leather belt around his waist and began to tie it around his right thigh.

* * *

Rickard burst through the door into Udina's office, hobbling through the wreckage of overturned chairs, a couch broken down the middle, a desk thrown on its side, several books and an e-reader blinking brokenly up at him, busted lamps and a cracked computer monitor until he reached the shattered remains of a window overlooking the Tower district.

He limped alongside the window, spotted the wall safe behind a still-intact cloth window curtain. His bloody pointer finger danced across the electronic keypad.

It clicked several times, beeped once and emitted a soft hiss as it slid open, revealing a data pad and a small plastic container.

Rickard pocketed the data pad and twisted the bottle in his hands for a moment, cursing softly at the child-proof lid. The cap eventually popped off.

He trembled and groaned weakly, shaking two pills into his hand. He stood in the light of the broken window amidst the destroyed office and threw the two pills back neat, grinding them between his teeth, too far gone with the pain to grimace at the chalky aftertaste. His face thrust upwards, his eyes squeezed shut, Rickard counted three very slow breaths.

Then he reached one hand up, grabbed his nose and-

-_crunch_-

-reset it.

He grunted, shook and coughed up a sticky wad of blood and phlegm. After a second's consideration, he spit it on Udina's floor.

Rickard tested his weight on his right leg, pressing his heel to the ground lightly.

"Mmm-mm," he mumbled, then shook two more pills from the plastic container.

As he chewed these, he hopped to the overturned desk and began pulling drawers out. Hard copy files, OSD's and thickly filled manila folders wrapped in rubber bands tumbled out onto the floor until-

"Bingo, Charlie," he said, and picked the spare omni-tool up. He connected it around his wrist, approached the window and, careful to choose a spot on the sill not littered with glass, made a call.

"Pasqer?"

"Rickard! What happened? The holo disconnected, I didn't-"

"I shot myself in the leg and fell out of a window on the thirty-seventh floor."

"Okay, fine, don't tell me what happened. What do you need?"

Rickard frowned. "I've lost track of my wayward crew, Pasquilino. I need updates on their whereabouts."

"You're in luck. They went off the grid for a while, all of them, but they're just resurfacing now."

Rickard looked out the window into the quad. An enormous shadow had overtaken the ruins, blocking the sun and throwing everything into a deep shade. He glanced up, and the breath shot from his lungs.

"Well," he gasped, "thank heaven for small favors."

*~~*~~*

[]

*~~*~~*

CITADEL  
UNDERGROUND MAINTENANCE TUNNELS  
EMERGENCY STAIRWELLS/ELEVATOR SHAFT

Three floors from the exit, Serina stopped again, pulling on the rough fabric of his jacket.

"Seriously, Tully, we should go back for her."

Tully turned, fuming. "Fine, go ahead, Serina. Have at it. When the three of you feel like leaving this godforsaken pit, I _might_ be waiting at the top, out it in the sunlight. But don't count on it."

Serina bit her lip, hard. Her eyes were red-rimmed and wet. She hesitated, checked the stairs behind them and then gripped the lapels of the turian's coat. She leaned herself against him.

Tully sighed. "Ser', don't," he said gruffly.

She growled against the side of his neck, placing small, desperate kisses on him until she reached his lips.

His hand grasped her throat. "I said, 'don't'!"

"Stop me." She put her lips on his.

He snarled, and his grip on her throat tightened.

Serina gasped and trembled, and what played across her lips was something between a grimace and a pleased smile. "That's it," she whispered against the harsh skin of his mouth, her voice hoarse in the little air he allowed her, "hurt me, baby. Make it hurt."

Tully cocked his head, scowling, his gaze hard and cold. Then, as if all the determination in him slipped at once, he smashed his mouth against hers and she folded into him.

They stood against the banister, deepening the kiss for an interminable moment, his hand on the small of her back, pressing against her yellow bodysuit, the other the still on her throat, though softer now, gracing her skin.

She moaned into his mouth as he pushed her off of him.

"Five floors, Serina. We'll walk down five floors."

She nodded. "Then?"

His face grew taut with anger again. "Then I go to Tyson with the rag, and you can stay here and collect the drug-addict and your bitch of a sister."

"That won't be necessary," a harsh voice croaked close by.

Something landed softly in a pile on the stairs at their feet.

The asari and the turian broke their embrace and whipped around. The krogan stood only feet away at the base of the stairs. He had a pistol and an assault rifle trained on them.

Tully stood rigid, watching him. Serina eyed what he'd dropped at their feet.

Anires' Venus jacket and small bag, half-filled with Hice.

"You probably don't want to know what pocket of flesh he was hiding that in," the krogan said to her.

Serina choked out an involuntary sob. "An-annie?"

The krogan shrugged. "She went down fast. Didn't feel much of it for long. I think that's worth something."

He was still pointing the pistol and her sister's rifle at them. His blood-red eyes hadn't strayed.

"What are you doing?" Tully asked.

The krogan simply arced a brow in response.

"You want the rag this bad? Why go to all this trouble? We're all armed, obviously you know who we are. Why risk getting yourself killed going up against the Creeps when you could've just made a better offer than Tyson?"

The other man chuckled. Serina thought it sounded like rocks sliding together. "You got a big head, kid, and it's swollen so as you don't see much past it. I know you, alright, better than you think. And I don't make trade deals with piss-ant small-timers lookin' for a quick fix on creds without the work. You've never stepped a foot off the Citadel, any of you. You don't know how real crime goes down. You've never had to follow the dark roads that bloodletting takes you to."

He took a single step towards them, weapons raised, inching closer. "I fired my warning shot into the asari's second-hand Venus and relieved you of your weapon and then I made my offer, and normally that'd be the only offer you'd get, a onetime deal that expired after that disappointing attempt to kill me. Now, I've dealt with half your little group and the hanar got my blood riled to the point where I want to kill something real bad, and I coulda' laid into you two just now, lost as you were.

"But let's just say I gotta problem with cutting down young love in its prime and maybe I'm feeling generous today, maybe just at this moment and for only a moment longer. So maybe you'll toss me the rag and take your girlfriend back to your clubhouse and screw away your wounded pride, and maybe I'll forget that any of you ever existed."

Tully quivered with rage. Serina bent down to retrieve the jacket.

The krogan _tsk_ed and shook his head. "That's just a visual aid, princess. Leave it be."

"It's Annie's," she said, grief barely contained.

"What do you think she'd mind losing more; the jacket or her sister? Leave it be."

Serina stepped away from the jacket, towards the wall.

Tully hesitated. "How do I know you'll let us go once I give you the rag?"

The krogan huffed, frustrated. "Enough talk!"

He pulled the trigger on the pistol. The shot struck the wall next to Serina's head, powder and small chunks of cement striking her in the face. The asari yelped and skipped closer to Tully, covering her cheek with her hand.

"Give me the rag!" The krogan bellowed.

"Wrex?"

The three of them glanced to the lower staircase. Another asari stood there, her face puzzled, an unconscious salarian in a Citadel employee uniform under one shoulder, his arm thrown across her back.

Tully reacted first, whipping out his pistol and firing at the krogan. The bullet punched into the armor plating on his chest and pushed him a few steps back.

Serina followed suit, thrusting one hand out, building a telekinetic charge and tossing the mercenary off his feet.

The krogan fired Anires' rifle in midair. Shots chattered along the staircase around them, dust and cement fragments billowing, thickening the air, pinging off the banister.

Serina ducked and reached her hand back towards Tully, seeking a weapon. He didn't hand her one. She glanced around, worried that he'd been hit.

Tully wasn't there. Her stomach clenched. _That bastard!_

Then the asari across the staircase telekinetically lifted her bodily off her feet, and the last thing Serina saw was the concrete above rushing down to meet her.

* * *

Liara watched the girl in the yellow jumpsuit strike the underside of the next floor headfirst and knew that she'd lost consciousness on the first blow. She gently settled her down in a heap on the floor.

Wrex was just getting to his feet.

"What was that all about?" Liara asked, slightly peeved, though she wasn't sure why. She let the salarian rest against the wall at the top of the third floor stairwell and walked to the krogan.

Clearly upset, Wrex checked the overheating gauge on the rifle and looked set to race up the stairs after the turian. Liara stepped in his way.

"Look out, Doc, I've got business to attend to here."

She ignored him, instead putting her hands on his large face. She brushed her fingers gingerly over the numerous fresh cuts across the rough skin. "Wrex, by the Goddess, some of these lacerations are serious! Did, did someone hit you with a-…did you get into a _bar fight_?"

He holstered the weapons and grasped her by the shoulders. "Doc, listen, thanks for the support, though you kinda' owed me for messing everything up just now anyway, but I have to go. I'll see you later."

He lifted her bodily out of the way, set her down and proceeded up the steps at a fast clip without another word, snatching up an odd-looking jacket as he went.

Liara sighed, looking back at the salarian. "Well, I've got you this far. I guess three more floors won't be so bad."

* * *

Tully dashed through the exit, right into a back-access channel of the Citadel embassy quad. He didn't stop running.

Not when he heard the door slam open again behind him and knew that the krogan was hot on his heels.

Not when he spotted the elevator several meters away, open and inviting despite the odd slant in the earth from all the destruction.

Not even when he realized it was unusually dark out, and glanced up into the sky, and started to scream.


End file.
